Taboo-style Game with Giant Bomb API data

I made a game in the style of Hasbro's "Taboo", with data from the Giant Bomb API. It you're not familiar with Taboo, it works something like this:

The Game:

On teams of 2 or more, one player tries to get his/her teammates to say the secret word listed on the top of the game card, but in doing so, they may not use any of the "taboo" words listed below it. For example if the secret word is "Mario" the taboo words might be "Nintendo", "plumber", "super", "fireball" and "Luigi". So you can't use those, instead you'd have to give your teammates other clues like "red hat", "overalls", "jumpman" in an attempt to make them guess the secret word "Mario". Generally speaking, the taboo words are the best clues for the secret word, so you have to think carefully about the secret word to describe it and still NOT say a taboo word (this can be tricky).

After your teammates guess "Mario", your team gets a point, and you can move to the next card. If you think the secret word is too hard, you can skip it, you get no points, but you move on to a card that might have an easier secret word. You get as many cards/points as you can in 1 minute, and then play moves to the next team. Play to a set number of points.

The Catch:

While you're giving clues to your teammates, a member of the other team is looking at the same card as you, and watching to make sure you don't say any of the taboo words. If you do say accidentally say a taboo word or the secret word, or any part of one of those words, the other team member calls out your mistake*, they get the point for their team, and you have to go to the next card.

The Technical Details:

I didn't use all the games in the Giantbomb database. Of those 60K+ games, most are old or crappy or otherwise insignificant. To make sure I only got easily recognizable games, I only used games that had been reviewed at Giantbomb.com. This reduces the pool of games to just over 600, which sounds like a lot, but if you have as much fun with this game as I have, you'll find that your list may run out sooner than you'd like. There's currently no mechanism in place to prevent repeats, but you should still be able to get several play sessions out of this before it ever becomes a problem.

Every secret word is a game title from the list of reviewed games at Giantbomb.com. Every taboo word is from that game's wiki page. They include: developer, publisher, and I think the first 2 of each of location, character, concept, theme and genre. Depending on the volume of data on each wiki page, some game titles may have more or less taboo clues than others. The more taboo clues there are, the harder it will be to communicate the secret word (because more clues are off-limits). By default the game limits the number of taboo words to a max of 6. This keeps the difficulty more uniform and keeps the game more like the original Taboo. In the "help/settings" you can remove this limit by turning "Expert Mode" on, which will give more taboo clues per card and make the game much tougher.

This is not a native ios app, it's just a web page. But it should work fine on iPods, iPads and iPhones, Android Firefox, and desktop Firefox and Chrome. It's less reliable on Android dolphin and desktop IE.

The Rest:

-you probably need at least 4 people to play (multiple teams of at least 2 people each), but only one internet device.

-arrange yourselves alternating by teams. I.E. sit around the table like Team A, Team B, Team A, Team B. Not like Team A, Team A, Team B, Team B. If you alternate, it'll be easier for the opposing team to watch for accidentally spoken taboo clues.

-follow the instruction on screen to go to the next card and score a point, or to skip the current card and get the next without scoring.

-after the timer expires, record your score for that round, pass the device to the next team, and click continue.

-there's also a "history" feature with game box art and links to the giantbomb.com page, but you can figure those out yourself.

Thanks for reading all this. Feedback of any kind is welcome, I hope you like it!

Giant Bomb Taboo Game

* I recommend yelling loudly "BOMB", "CHINA DON'T CARE", or "IT'S TUUUEESDAY".

That's pretty neat. I have absolutely no one to play it with though. If only it were playable against others online! :D

It could use a little web design work, but it's a super neat idea. Great job.

O wow, this looks like it could be fun (particularly with Expert Mode on). The look of the page does need some improvements, though.

Next time I'm with a group of nerdy friends I hope I don't forget to give this a try.

Thanks for the feedback guys. It was made to be used on a mobile device, so the labels and buttons stretch across 100% of the width of the screen. If you look at it on a desktop browser, it probably looks pretty weird, but it you view it on a phone it should look like a card (as if drawn from the box of Taboo cards).

Is there anything else that you think specifically needs to be addressed with regard to to the visual design or anything else?

It would be nice if it was it's own website with a shorter domain name.

Someone should get the guys to play this on a "Giantbomb Unplugged" video. And they should play the expert version since they all live and breath this info all the time. It would be a faster and more frantic game than D&D (not that that's good or bad... just different, variety is good).