Hangman

Hangman is the pen-and-paper game everybody already knows: a hidden word, one letter at a time, and a short supply of wrong answers. Here the word comes with its category — Animals, Food and drink, The body — which is the difference between a game of deduction and a vocabulary quiz. Six wrong letters is not enough to search a dictionary with, and it was never meant to be.

The picture is ours. Instead of a gallows there is a sandcastle, and every wrong letter takes a piece of it while the tide comes up the beach. The game underneath is unchanged — same six chances, same closing-in — but this site has a children's section and a stick figure on a rope is the one image on it we would not want a parent to meet by accident. Nothing else about the game moved to make room for that.

There are two hundred and fifty-odd words, all common English, none of them spelled one way here and another way there. A letter you have already tried costs nothing, so there is no punishment for losing track. Your streak is kept on this device and nowhere else, and no account is involved.