Cowboy Hangman

Hangman is one of those games we all played in elementary school on the back of a notebook. One player picks a word and the other guesses letters, and every wrong guess adds another line to a stick figure being hanged. After seven wrong guesses the man is dead and you lose. Our version is the classic game, with a few changes that make it work for kids who are just learning to read.

The first change was swapping the gallows for a cowboy and a noose, because seven-year-olds don't need to stare at an explicit hanging diagram for ten minutes. The cowboy theme also suits the vocabulary we filled the word list with, which is cowboy-friendly stuff like animals, foods, weather and places. Most words in the default category are 4 to 7 letters long. We don't mind if a category hands the kids too many easy wins. What matters is that they pick up the rhythm of guessing letters, ruling out possibilities and narrowing down the word.

How to be good at hangman. Start with the vowels (E, A, I, O, U). Almost every word has at least two of them, and knowing which ones are in the word rules out a huge chunk of the possibilities. After the vowels, go for the most common consonants, which are R, S, T, L, N and D. By the time you've guessed all eleven of those letters, you've probably already won, or you at least know enough to make educated guesses for the rest.

Don't guess letters at random. Use them to eliminate. If you've revealed _A_O_S and a couple of your letters were wrong, ask yourself which English words fit that pattern. There aren't many. TACOS? Possible. PATIOS? Doesn't fit the spacing. Hangman goes best for players who treat it as a deduction puzzle rather than a vocabulary test.

Some build notes. The cowboy is drawn one limb at a time on a canvas, one new line per wrong guess. Categories and words live in a flat JSON file with a few hundred entries. The hardest engineering decision was how strict to be about upper and lower case. Kids almost always type in lowercase, but the revealed word looks better in capitals, so we went with auto-uppercase on the display and case-insensitive input. For more word puzzles, try Word Vault or Associations.