A new release from Kevin Wells is kHangman, a variation on everyone’s favourite game in which the punishment for not successfully guessing a word is to be hanged. Well, virtually, anyway, with an image of a hanging matchstick man drawn piece by piece with each letter guessed incorrectly – your game is over when the image is complete.
In other words, you have a limit in terms of how many times you can guess incorrectly before your game is lost – that’s really the crucial point; the depiction could really be anything at all that is divided up into the right number of steps from start to completion, but the game has always been ‘hangman’, not (for example) ‘envelope’.
Kev’s version of the game starts with the platform already built, which reduces the number of incorrect guesses allowed compared with how I played the game when I was young – drawing the three main lines of the frame and one for the rope equated to four more guesses – but other than that, the game is pretty much the same.
This implementation offers a choice of five dictionaries for the word sources – the ‘default’ option consisting of normal dictionary words, along with ’42’ with words taken from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series of books, a ‘Computing’ set, a ‘Discworld’ set borrowing from Terry Pratchett’s comedy/fantasy book series, and a ‘Lexx’ set with words taken from the science fiction TV series of the same name.
Once you’ve played a game to completion – whether you’ve successfully avoided the noose or not – you then get the option to click a button to look up the word online.
