"the guesser" oh ok that name makes sense "the EXECUTIONER" oh ok

"A teacher takes the role of executioner"

I like the idea that "winning" as the executioner isn't a "I drew the person you lose", it's more of "I got to spend 20 minutes doodling a super detailed person before you finally got it" like the number of lines isn't the guesser's lives, it's the executioner's score.

My school banned hangman due to the nature of hanging someone, so a group of students created a new word guessing game called: "Car crash"

Note to self: Never play hangman with this guy

"hangman is a game that everyone has played, but no one knows the rules to" uno:

The executioner serves a role, not as a competitor, but as a sort of _game master_ . It's the same idea as a person creating a puzzle for another person to solve. You want to give them a challenge but you also want to see them overcome that challenge. Except for in this case, the puzzle requires another entity to facilitate it, be it a person or computer. It's like the game Mastermind (or Wordle for a more relevant example), where you have to guess the colors or letters in an order, but you need something or someone else to track the puzzle for you since that requires knowing the solution already.

In my elementary school we played this as “Flower”. Every time a student got an answer wrong the teacher would erase a petal from the flower they drew on the board. We went until there were no more petals left or someone won.

I always thought the "don't be a dick" rule was generally universal

> "I've been thinking about hangman a lot recently," are are you okay

There was a trend in my 5th grade class to use the word "rhombicosidodecahedron" as the hangman word. Unfortunately after two uses, the guessers won before all the blanks were drawn

it's ironic how most childhood games or rhymes are based on tragedy. london bridge is falling down hangman ring around the rosy jack and jill 'cooties' was coined from kutu, which is a parasitic bug. it really makes you think about the origin of these rhymes/games and why they became so popular for children.

We all knew that good guy who put a smilie face, hair, clothes until you got it

J i'm now the world's best hangman player

Years ago, I played this with my granny on a roadtrip and she couldn't guess the word "camera". I ended up giving the hangman hair, shoes, a face, a purse, and I realised I totally skipped over the letters she guessed right because I was so focussed on dressing it up 😅

The “there’s a better word than jazz by just changing the vowel” joke is underrated

I love how you didn’t even mention the fact that when the guesser wins, the executioner is left with either a disembodied head, or an amputated corpse.

Alternative title: Most efficient way to lose all your friends

"You won't be able to convince them that's how hangman works, but the rules are vague enough that you can convince them that you *think* that's how hangman works" Never has someone so succinctly explained trolling/concern trolling before

I remember finding an animated yt video about a murder mystery and how the man hanged himself. My mom saw it and told me not to watch it because she thought I would be encouraged to do it. Later, I went on cool math games and played hangman, and I kept thinking, "OMG if mom finds out she'll kill me." Then one day she was like, "Oh Nika, do you know the game Hangman?" I was in pure shock🤣

My schools didn’t “censor” it when we played. Gallows were almost always included

I’ve never seen hangman done with anything other than a man being hanged, even in a classroom.

To emphasize just how non-standardized the game is, you saying that you draw the gallows first was bewildering to me because I’d always played it where the executioner had to draw the gallows as well, giving the guesser four extra guesses in the process.

My mother once, without realizing where she was, picked up a small half-pencil and a peice of paper and loudly asked "ANYBODY WANNA PLAY HANGMAN?!" in an effort to cheer up my brother...in the mental hospital! We were surrounded by teenagers being visited by their parents in a very quiet visitor room. Some had clearly tried to hurt themselves. My mom didn't realize how inappropriate it was until she said it out loud. My brother is doing great now and we still tease my mom for it but at the time my then-partner and I just facepalmed hard.

how to win as a guesser: use an incredibly complicated strategy how to win as executioner: be a *jerk*

Hangman *is* a word-guessing game, but under "no-cheating" rules, it's more like a player-vs-dungeon-master rather than player-vs-player game.

Fhqwgads will always be a real word in our hearts.

Talk about weird childhood games. In Finland we had "Whose afraid of the black man?" Idea is that there is two lines with 10-15 meters space between. Players go to one line, and the "black man" tries to touch you after saying that rhyme. Players need to hurry to the other line. If you are caught, you join as a black man. Game ends when everyone is the black man. TBH, I never thought of the "black man" as being literal black man, I always thought it was like some shadowmonster or something. Until I grew and figured it out. I think children don't quite understand the racism or morbidness of games, they just like to play.

I've literally never considered how morbid the game is. I just accepted it

As you note, playing to "win" as the executioner is not very fun, but you don't quite make the leap to it not really being an adversarial game. The goal of the executioner is to create a customized challenge for the guesser, calibrating the difficulty to their skill level so it's possible but not trivial. Perhaps the best analogy is a game master in a table-top roleplaying game.

I've always thought of Hangman like if the guy hangs then no one wins, but if the guessers guess the word, then they win, and the "executioner" is just someone who does the game.

In Portuguese we use til and accents in a lot of words and when we play hangman we tend to include them when the player says the original letter like the word Não (no) if a player says "A" we mark it as à because it wouldn't make sense to play it otherwise. we also have "ç" which is it's own letter but we consider when people says "C"

in primary school my teacher would draw clothes, hair, and a big smile on the stickman when we weren’t getting the word

Brb about to win some hangman

this is easily the best guide i’ve seen on how to lose all your friends while playing hangman

As a former guesser, I can attest that after losing a few times to the executioner, guessers stop guessing--and that robs the game of all joy for the executioner. So the executioner is motivated to pick simple-ish words that can be guessed, leading the guesser to build up confidence until they inevitably fail to guess a moderately easy word, which allows the executioner to never let them forget their loss.

My teacher called it “hang person” she believed in everyone being hanged equally.

I've never thought of hangman as competitive or cooperative. In my mind, the executioner was just there to facilitate the game as opposed to actively try and win it. Though I suppose that makes sense, since they do have say over what word is chosen. But the fact hangman isn't fun winning in the role of executioner has always meant people play it to see the guessers' reactions, in my experience; not to actively make them suffer. :D

In the Hungarian language there are multiple duble letter (sz, ty, gy, dz, ly) and one triple letter (dzs). We have to connect these letters line with a curve under neath. If a word contains for exaple the letter , and the guesser guess the and we consider them wrong. The is one of the least common letter (except for the , , and , bc we use them almost nowhere, exept in old surnames) P.S.:Our ABC is 44 letters long...

"queue" is a surprisingly fun word to use in hangman. Things go well untill suddenly "da faq is '_ueue'? Is that even a word in english?" And i happily reassure them that it is a word they know.

can we take a moment that this guy basically wrote a several pages long analysis paper and then made a full video with text and drawings for it? like, wow, that's impressive

I feel like most creepy things or whatever are always for children like some nursery rhymes just have the most spine chilling meanings it's crazy.

when i was in outpatient for anxiety management, we did one called “build a house”. that’s when I personally realized how strange hangman was. Great video!

“Darn it. I lost. What was the word?” “Fhqwhgads” “What?” “Fhqwhgads” *”E X C U S E M E W H A T ?”*

never lost with “zephyr”

Fun fact: It is completely possible to play connect four on paper if you use x and o rather than red and yellow disks.

15:20 you clearly have never heard of ultimate tic-tac-toe. - Draw a field of 3x3 tic-tac-toe fields for 9 tic tac toe fields in total - Player 1 starts and can plane his symbol in any of the 9 fields. - Player 2 has to play in the field equal to the place where player 1 has placed his symbol. For example player one places his symbol on the right middle field (big field) in the top middle square (with ing the big field), player 2 has to them place his symbol anywhere on the top middle field. Rinse and repeat. - If you force your opponent to play in a field where someone has already won they get to place their symbol anywhere. -The game is won when one player has won 3 fields next to each other, just like in normal tic-tac-toe.

I'll side with you if you can get people to start singing "apostrophe" as part of the alphabet song

I knew the jazz thing in advance. One time my family was in a restaurant waiting for food and we were all like "let's play hangman". My stepsister pulled out her phone and googled something, then drew 4 dashes on the paper. I was like "is it jazz" and she was totally aghast. Like, maybe don't pick the word that's famous for being the hardest to guess.

I always played where the executioner would have to write their word down on a hidden piece of paper at the start, to prevent them swapping it mid-game. I’m pretty sure this called way more attention to that way of cheating really

My teacher called it “hang-spider” and made us draw a spider instead of a man. I honestly never would’ve thought abt the fact that we were drawing a live execution if she hadn’t brought attention to it though

That moment when the example word was "fhqwhgads" made me die.

"usually in a classroom you would just cross out apples" WHAT, I'VE BEEN KILLING MEN SINCE I WAS 3 YOU TELLING ME THIS JUST NOW

One problem with your guesser strategy: It gets completely demolished by certain executioner strategies. For example, if the executioner figures out your strategy, they can just pick words that deliberately counter it, and you will always lose. To make a truly "perfect strategy" from a game theory perspective, you would need to introduce an element of randomness to your guesses.

Focusing on the whole 'its more fun for the guesser to win' I want to say something that my sister and I do when we play. We go in turns and always re-use the same hangman and gallows instead of drawing a new one. Also, the most crucial difference is that the executioner can never win. No matter how many wrong guesses the guesser has, the man is never killed. We just keep adding things. Once we drew an entire town. I think the main reason we do this is to find the most creative word to use. Sometimes we agree the words have to be in a specific genre, sometimes we go for funny words. Others times we make it as difficult as can be. My point is, the executioner winning isn't fun, so a good way to play it is to make it one-sided, as weird as that sounds.

"To make it extra hard, don't even write down their wrong guesses, force them to remember it by themselves" This man is evil

Isn’t hangman like Monopoly, everyone knows how to play Monopoly yet no one knows how to actually play Monopoly

It’s easy to make hangman an asymmetric competitive game. Just standardize the number of turns, settle on dictionary of words to use, and have the executioner write down the word and hide it ahead of time. That’s the scenario I want to look it, mathematically it most have some sort of equilibrium strategy. It’s interesting to think about because the optimal strategy for the executioner is NOT to choose the hardest word because then the guesser would know to just guess that word, some sort of randomization would be involved but it’s not clear how.

I used to love hangman so much as a kid. Never really thought about how bizarre the theme was. As I’ve grown up now, it’s quite odd to me and got me really curious how everyone is still open to play this game, but tbh I still sometimes miss those days playing hangman without any other stress lol.

Imagine hangman in chinese, where there are 2000 individual characters whose meaning is specific to words

I like telling the guesser the subject is Disney characters and picking “Quasimodo”

Me and some of my friends occasionally play an adapted version of hangman in which several players can take part. Turn order is decided via whatever method we come up with (usually by rolling a die with a ridiculous amount of sides, closest guess goes first), and having players take it in turns to guess letters, and a correct guess means you get to go again. There's a scoring system, too. Each correctly placed letter is worth two points. For example, if you guess A and it appears three times, you get six points. At ANY point, if you think you know the word, you can shout it out. If wrong, you can't guess again until your next turn, and if it's currently your turn when you make the guess and you're wrong, your turn ends immediately. If you're right, you get points equal to the length of the word (9 letters = 9 points). If you guess it correctly during your turn, then the reward is doubled (9 letters = 18 points). The game goes on for however long we feel like going for, and at the end, most points wins. Whoever guesses the word right must go last on the next round, to help balance things. The "executioner" remains the same person throughout the entire game, similar to a banker in Monopoly. The only issue we have is that one player wins almost every session.

this sounds like he's trying to explain earth games to aliens

"everyone has played it, but nobody knows the rules" That's just Uno for me. I mean, I know there *are* rules, but every group has their own.

this is actually one of the greatest videos on youtube, great work

During the last week of senior year we played hangman. At first it was all fun with simple words, usually references to inside jokes and topics in class. Then our teacher picked "axt" (german for axe) and NOBODY guessed it. It was a massive defeat. After that nobody played fair anymore, it was all about how much you could destroy peoples will to live. I love the chaos that hangman can cause in a group of people. So simple yet so beautiful.

Someone once tried to use "Antidisestablishmentarianism" on the belief that no one would ever guess such a long word. I managed to guess the word without needing a single letter because there are no other 28 letter words in the English language. Honestly, it was more impressive that they knew how to spell it then my being able to guess it.

in the mental hospital we weren’t allowed to talk abt hanging (for obvious reasons) and we called it butterfly man 💀

The fact that "Jizz" is the true hardest word to guess in hangman is very amusing to me

the thing is, here where i live hangman is called "tu seras pendu" which is french for "you will be hanged" which kind of sounds like a threat now that i think about it. ive never really paid attention to what it translated to in english for some reason but now that i am i can conclude that damn, this game is dark. 😧

I want to be this kinda person, that takes a random subject and can talk so interestingly about it that keeps me with them for 19 minutes

Strengths is a good one - nine letters, one vowel. Players assume there must be more vowels in it, and so waste turns guessing them.

I love your videos. I've rewatched this one and many others so many times. Thank you.

i doubt you will ever see this but i just want to thank you for this video, as it inspired me to finish a wip song i had laying around. it previously did not have a title, but now it's 'hangman' :)

My go to word when I’m playing Hangman against people that don’t know any better is “Uncopyrightable”; it’s the longest word in the English language with no repeating letters.

I love how he just says "VHQWHGADS" perfectly

why did i watch this and why was i completely invested the whole video

This one reminds me of how we played Pictionary at camp with what I believe was a green marker, and when it was my turn to choose a word for the people to guess and the person to draw, I chose “purple.” These games are too easy to cheese as an adversarial player because that isn’t the intent

jan Misali: My word is __. what is my word? guesser: guesses the 26 letters of the alphabet jan Misali: FOOL my word was " ' "

I don't think the reason the executioner avoids cheating in most cases is due to the fun level of winning. It's clearly a social pact where there's an unspoken agreement that you are playing in good faith. Even kids understand quickly that if you cheat, no one wants to play games with you.

Never thought I'd find a nearly 20 minute video about hangman in my recommended but here we are. Interesting stuff! I'd never really considered what an odd game it really is before. One thing I noted that's different from how I used to play (Not sure if it's a regional difference or a "lower difficulty") was I we used to draw the lines of the gallows as penalties for wrong guesses too. And I remember having a diagonal beam connecting the top and the post as well (Though that may have been more of a stylistic choice and, again, adding more guesses)

I would just add that the strategy is not just letter frequency, but knowing the common patterns of words in whatever language it is (the letters that are/aren't likely to show up near one another or ways that words often begin or end)

If you use "queue", when someone guesses the letter "q", they put the q down, but when someone guesses the word "queue", you can say that they already guessed it lol

In school we played the one where you also draw the gallows (I can't really remember any one with a pre-made gallow, even if it's just adding the rope). And there used to be the odd executioner that'd go as far as drawing fingers until someone finally got it.

I kept getting this video in my recommended and was apprehensive about watching it because I didn't want to watch a 20-minute video about the already-tired "hangman is weird because you hang someone and children play it" conversation. Thank you for subverting my expectations

We at school would have to write the word on the backside of the board where no one could see it. We also had a shortcut system that instead of a letter you were allowed to guess the whole word, but if you guessed wrong, it counted as a wrong guess with no new letter information. This added a tension between wanting to win and peer pressure not to ruin the game for everyone else

“Many children’s games have dark themes, from ring around the Rosie to Fortnite” -Jan misali

my catholic school had a ban on hangman for being "too morbid" while there was a crucifix in every room

The game you described as competitive pictionary exists. I don't know the English name, here in Germany we call it 'Montagsmaler' (literally: monday painter). The executioner draws one line after another after which each guesser has one quess, then the executioner draws another line and it repeats until the picture is finished. The game is all about trick pictures... things like 'a jigglypuff as seen from above' (before pokemon that was balls or mexicans) or 'a giraffe's in front of a living room window'.

When I worked in Japan, the teachers were like “no, NO hangman!!” Apparently what they did instead were a melting snowman (you’d do a basic pic of a snowman and erase one part for each incorrect one, “melting” part of the snowman,) or a flower and erase a petal for each incorrect one.

Executioner: Try this "_" Guesser: Can I get a hint? Executioner: It's a letter Guesser:

The weirdest part is that it hasn't lauched any updates since its release

This is the only video anyone will ever need on hangman

hangman sounds like a great beginner friendly programing project instead of the usual tic-tac-toe

One big point: Make sure the executioner had spelled the word correctly.

The way he says 'fhqwhgads' with such a neutral and serious tone got me choking jdhdgshsgdggd

12:45 is such a funny fucking screenshot like this just screams the tumblr/homestuck era humor that flows so strongly through this channel and I love it

I Germany it's the stand first, then the stick thingy that's above that, then the other thingy that the rope of the hanged person is wrapped around, then the head (without face), the stick torso/the middle part, one arm, the other arm, one leg, the other leg and, if the drawer is feeling generous, then the face. So about ten tries!

when you make your hangman sentence ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’

I remember starting with just the blanks, then, when the first wrong letter was guessed, beginning with either the pole of the gallows or the ground/hill. Sometimes the wrong letters would be put in that hill (upside-down parabola).