Overview
At a glance
Is this game right for my group?
ABG editorial scores on a 1–5 scale.
Harder to teach
High replayability
Low interaction
Scales well
Deep strategy
How it plays
How does it play?
The Only Word is a vivid party word game that brings your imagination and creativity to a new level and guarantees ultimate fun.
Core mechanisms
Key systems that shape the decisions players make.
Communication Limits
Rules restrict what players may say, show, or reveal while cooperating.
Cooperative Game
Players coordinate their actions toward a shared objective and win or lose together.
Deduction
Combine clues and exclusions to identify hidden information.
Induction
Infer a hidden rule by comparing which examples satisfy it.
Solo / Solitaire Game
Provide rules and objectives designed for a single player.
Read the full game description
The Only Word is a vivid party word game that brings your imagination and creativity to a new level and guarantees ultimate fun. Inspired by Codenames, the game features the best advantages of compact travel tabletop games – very easy to explain, very dynamic and can be played even on the way without a table. Other key advantages of the game – all the players are in the game all the time and you get both competitive (each player plays for himself) and cooperative modes in one box. How to play the game: Take your cards in hand as your personal deck, and move the first card slightly down. The numbers of the second card indicate the words of the first card - they are your challenge! Describe (or rather bridge) your challenge words with a one-word clue. The players have an option to choose how many challenge words (2 or 3) they will bridge. Speak out your clue and show your card - other players should rack their brains to be the first who guess all the words you described. The players have only one try to show how shrewd they are. The first player to solve the clue discards one of his cards. The goal of the game is to get rid of all the cards. Why the game is so cute: easy game rules, that can be explained in 1 minute - it’s a perfect family game; you don’t need a table to play the game, so you can take it wherever you want; it is very dynamic, all the players are in the game every turn; the game has both competitive (3+) and cooperative (2+) modes; two difficulty levels; the game is bilingual: the words on the cards are in the English and in the Russian languages (for the Russian edition). You can play in one of the languages or in both; very replayable with the total of 1008 words on the cards. —description from the designer