Ideas for your own words: make the game about your friends
Why your own words beat any ready-made deck
A ready-made deck is fair to everyone, which is exactly why it rarely produces the loudest laugh of the night. The moment people remember is when the describer looks at the screen, sees the name of the bar where two of you once got locked out, and has to explain it without saying a single part of the name. Nobody outside your group could have written that word.
In Say It, adding your own words is the heart of the game, not a hidden setting. Everyone in the lobby types words on their own phone before the host starts, and those words are shuffled together with whatever share of the built-in deck the host keeps. Below are categories that work, a few that backfire, and a quick way to get everyone writing.
Places you have been together
Places are the easiest start, because every group has them and they are surprisingly fun to describe. Think of the campsite where it rained for three days, the street where one of you used to live, the café that always got the order wrong, or the city you visited for someone’s wedding. The team usually gets there through a chain of “wait, that time when…”.
Write each place the way your group actually says it. If everyone calls a flat “the yellow house”, type that rather than the real address. The word on the screen should spark recognition in a second, not force the describer to decode it while the clock runs.
Running jokes, catchphrases and nicknames
Every group has phrases that mean nothing to strangers: a typo from the group chat that became a word, a nickname for someone’s old car, a sentence a friend said once and never lived down. These make excellent entries, because the describer has to rebuild the whole context from scratch, and the team often shouts the answer before the clue is even finished.
A good test is whether at least half of the players would recognise the reference. A joke that only two people share will simply be skipped, and in Say It a skip costs a point, although the score never drops below zero. Aim for stories the whole room was part of, or ones that have been retold so often that everyone knows them by heart.
Ordinary things with a story attached
Some of the best words are everyday objects with history: the burnt lasagne, the karaoke microphone that only worked upside down, the spreadsheet for splitting rent, a friend’s famous homemade cocktail. Someone new to the group can still guess the plain object, while the old friends laugh at what it really means.
That balance matters when the evening includes partners, flatmates or colleagues who do not know the whole backstory. If every word is a deep cut, newcomers stop guessing and drift to their phones. Ask each person to add a few personal words and a few ordinary ones linked to the occasion, so everyone has something they can get.
People’s names: kind, not cruel
Putting the players themselves into the deck can be brilliant. Describing a friend who is sitting right there, purely through their habits, is one of the fastest ways to make a room laugh. Public figures your group argues about all the time work well too.
The rule of thumb is to describe someone only in a way they would happily hear out loud. Leave out exes, moments a person has asked you to forget, and sensitive topics like health, money or relationships. The describer has to talk about the word for several seconds in front of everyone, and something that felt funny while typing it alone can land badly. If in doubt, leave it out; the game will not miss it.
How many words you need, and how to mix them
Every player describes twice per game, so eight players means sixteen turns. In a one-minute turn a team usually gets through a handful of words, more with a fast describer and fewer with a chatty one, so a pool of well over a hundred words keeps repeats away. Personal words rarely reach that number on their own, and that is what the built-in deck is for.
The host decides how much of the built-in deck of about 1,500 everyday words goes into the game: all of it, part of it, or none. With thirty or forty personal words, mixing in part of the built-in deck keeps the personal ones as surprises rather than the entire game. If the group has been busy and the list is long, switch the built-in deck off and play only your own words.
Get everyone writing in five minutes
Typing words on demand is harder than it sounds, so give people prompts. Ask each player for one place you have been together, one thing somebody always says, one object from a shared flat or office, one food, and one word from the last trip or party. Five prompts per person build a solid personal deck quickly, and the variety stops it from leaning on one person’s memories.
For a competitive twist, try Captains mode. Each team’s captain writes the words the other team will describe, and can add random built-in words, reroll the ones they dislike and pin the ones they want to keep.
If you play with the same people often, create a free account and save your best words as a word pack. Next time you load it in the lobby in a few taps and only add the new stories, so over time the pack becomes a small archive of everything you have done together.
Do players need an account to add their own words?
No. Anyone in the lobby can add words without signing up. An account is only needed to save your words as a reusable pack, or to add ready-made packs such as Holidays & New Year or Office.
What happens if a word turns out to be too obscure?
The describer taps Skip and moves on, which costs one point. After every round everyone sees the guessed and skipped words, which is the perfect moment for the person who added the obscure one to tell the story behind it. Often that explanation gets a bigger laugh than the round itself.
Can we play with only our own words?
Yes. The host can leave the built-in deck out completely, so every word in the game comes from the players. Just make sure the list is long enough for every turn, since each player describes twice.