Letter Categories – Play Online for Free

Nobody knows who invented the categories game. In Germany it is called Stadt, Land, Fluss (city, country, river) and was in print under that name by 1937, in Ilse Obrig's book of games "Kinder, wir spielen!". The version played today, where everyone stops the moment one player has filled every box, goes back to the 1930s as well. Its ancestors are far older: a German reader from 1784 already had a word game with lines like "My name is August, I come from Africa and I trade in apes." A Vienna newspaper recommended the game in 1938 because it teaches a little geography along the way.

The French call it Petit Bac, Italians play it as Nomi, cose, città, and British kids know it as Stop the Bus. In North America many players met it through the boxed game Scattergories®, launched by Milton Bradley in 1988 and now owned by Hasbro; our Letter Categories stands on its own and is not connected with Hasbro. It brings the classic round to your screen with three computer opponents, so you can play this categories game online without pencil and paper, at no cost and as many times as you want.

One Letter, Six Cards: Rules and Tips for Letter Categories

A game has five rounds. In each one you look for six answers that start with the round's letter: a city, a country, a river, a first name, an animal and a job, while three computer players write at the same time.

• The letter: when a round begins, the white tile above the keyboard lights up. A click on the table spins the alphabet across it until it stops on the letter of the round. All 26 letters can come up, each one gets its turn before any letter repeats, and no letter appears twice in a game.
• Writing: tap one of your six cards and type with the on-screen keyboard or your real one, and Enter jumps to the next empty card. A word with the wrong first letter is not accepted at all. You have two minutes, counted down by the round dial to the left of the tile.
• What counts: under City go towns, cities and villages of the United States and the United Kingdom, and the better-known towns of the rest of the world, but no neighborhoods, boroughs or counties. A country is a sovereign state, one of the four nations of the UK or an area with its own country code like Greenland; short forms such as USA or Holland are fine, US states and islands are not. A river counts with or without the word River, so Hudson and Snake River both work. Name means a first name, and Animal takes broad groups like Bird and young animals like Puppy, just not "Animal" itself. For Animal and Job the plural counts like the singular, and real occupations count, titles like King do not. The game does not forgive typos.
• Stop: as soon as all six answers are valid, the "Stop!" button appears to the right of the tile. Pressing it ends your writing, and everyone else gets ten more seconds. No country starts with X, so on X five answers are enough. If nobody calls, the round ends after two minutes.
• Speeding up the wait: out of ideas? Move the mouse over the round dial, a lightning bolt appears, and a click runs the rest of the round ten times faster; on a phone you tap twice. Your opponents' answers stay the same, they just arrive sooner.
• Scoring: the cards are revealed one category at a time. The only valid answer in a category earns 20 points, an answer nobody else chose earns 10, and an answer someone else also wrote gives each of you 5. Empty cards and words the game does not know score nothing and are crossed out.
• Winning: after five rounds the highest total wins. If two players are tied for the lead, one more round follows with a new letter.
• The levels: Easy, Normal and Hard share the same rules. The higher the level, the more answers your opponents know, the faster they find them and the less often they go for the obvious one.

Switch tabs and the clock waits for you. Here is how to score more:

• Bank the easy ones: write down whatever comes to mind first, then jump to the next card. Getting stuck on a river costs time you need for the other five.
• Skip the obvious: on B lots of players write Boston, and a shared answer is worth only 5. With Buffalo or Birmingham you stand alone more often and take 10.
• Use the button as a check: if "Stop!" does not appear although every card is filled, a typo or a word that does not count is hiding somewhere. The game will not tell you where, but you know to look.
• Watch your opponents: each time a computer player has an answer, one of its cards lifts. When nearly all of an opponent's cards are up, its Stop is close.
• Stay calm on hard letters: on Q think of Quebec, Qatar and the quail, on Y of Yemen, the Yukon and the yak. A single valid answer that no one else finds earns the full 20 there.
• Let the gaps guide you: an empty card shows the round's letter faintly printed on it, so you can see at a glance what is still missing.

Still Not Enough Letters? Five Word Games for Quick Minds

If a few rounds have warmed you up, try one of these next:

• Hangman: the word is already set, only its letters are missing. You guess them one at a time, and on Easy and Normal a category tells you where to look.
• Word Tiles: seven letter tiles on your rack and a board full of premium squares. Build words across the grid and outscore the computer.
• Crossword: classic clues across and down, and every answer you solve hands you letters for the words that cross it.
• Arrowword: the clues sit right inside the grid, and arrows point the way each answer runs.
• Word Search: a square of letters with words hidden in every direction. Find them all and mark each one off.