🔤 HANGMAN

Sixty hidden words, six lives, and one letter at a time

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Lives
6
Letters tried
0
Wins
0
Losses
0

⌨️ Controls

  • Just type a letter — any letter is a guess
  • Or click the alphabet along the bottom of the picture
  • ENTER a new word  •  ESC pause
  • The A E I O U button tries all five vowels at once.
  • 🎮 Xbox controller? Not this one, sorry — this game is about typing letters, and a controller has no letters on it. Every other game takes a pad.

🎯 How to play

  • A word is hidden. Every letter you find is filled in.
  • A letter that is not in the word costs a life and draws another line.
  • Six wrong guesses and the picture is finished.
  • Guessing the same letter twice is free — it costs nothing.

🧠 Getting good

  • Start with the vowels: E, A, I, O, U. Almost every word has one.
  • Then the common consonants: R, S, T, N, L.
  • Count the blanks. Short words are much harder than long ones.
  • Look at what you have: _ I O N is not many words.

🧑‍💻 For young coders: build this game yourself

This game is split into small library files inside funtime/lib/, and every function has a comment saying exactly what goes in, what comes out, and the algorithm in plain English. Empty any function out, read its comment, and write it yourself.

File What it does Good functions to try re-writing
lib/hangman-rules.js The rules: hiding the word, counting mistakes maskedWord, isWordComplete, wrongLetters, guessLetter
lib/hangman-draw.js The drawing that grows one line at a time drawGallows, drawParts, renderGame
lib/hangman-main.js The glue: the keyboard and the alphabet row doAction, connectBoard, setUpGame

💡 The big idea: work things out, do not store them twice. The number of lives left is not kept anywhere — it is counted from the guesses whenever it is needed. Two copies of the same fact can disagree with each other; one cannot.

🛠️ Want to be walked through it? Build Hangman Yourself takes you through the key functions one step at a time and tests each one you write. There is a Python version too.