I'll Allow It! Game like Heads Up! or HeadBandz

Hey guys. I just wanted to share with you a little fun project I've been working on called I'll Allow It! If you've ever played the games Heads Up! or HeadBandz, then you'll get it right away.

It's a game for 2 or more players, but 4 or more is best. In a 4 player game, you break up into 2 teams. One player holds the game and doesn't let his partner see the screen. The partner has to guess the word shown.

I've got the screen formatted for my tablet right now, in landscape mode, but you can easily play on your laptop or phone. More "prettiness" is coming.

You can tell your partner the category and give clues, but you cannot do any of the following:

• Say how many letters or syllables
• Say any variation of or part of the word
• Say any rhyming words; "sounds like" or "rhymes with"
• Say it "starts with the letter..."
• Use any sound effects like "moo"
• You can't say "blank" or anything related like "miles per ____"

Aside from that, you can use any clues you like to get your partner to answer the word. For example, in the picture shown, the word is "user" so I can tell my partner "the topic is computers," and then say something like "this is a person who works on a computer." I can't say "uses a computer" because "uses" is a variation of the word "use." If they still don't get it, I'd say "the person who types on the keyboard." I can't say "4 letters, starts with U, rhymes with boozer." Easy enough?

If the person gives the correct answer, tap on "I'll Allow It." If not, "No Way!" You can decide how many questions you want to answer in each round. Your score will be calculated in the upper-left corner. Click "Next Round" when it's the other team's turn. I thought about adding a timer to the game, but I'm not sure. I like it relaxed. Some people might like to see how many words you can guess in 2 minutes, for example. Let me know if you think I should add a timer.

I added a "Skip Question" option in case you get a word you don't like. If you don't know the word, click on "Define Word" and you'll be taken to Google for the word's definition. 

Why did I build this game? Well, my girlfriend and I really enjoy playing that game Ellen promotes, Heads Up! on my tablet. The card decks are quite limited, however, and although they're not that expensive (a dollar or two each) you start seeing repeats very quickly. So I said to her "I can build something like this in a day." And I did. I put together the coding for the game in ASP with an SQL Server database behind it. Took me about an hour. 

The hard part was finding lists of words. So, I started scouring the Web. At first I dumped 100,000+ words right from the dictionary into the database, but that was no fun. You'd get weird variants on words "impress," "impressive," "impressed." So I needed to be a little more selective with the word lists. Deleted that. Started over. 

So then I built a database (in Access, of course, duh!) so that I could just load up words from various vocabulary lists, Wikipedia pages, etc. I'd parse them out, and dump them into the online database. I set up categories and started going to town. I grabbed lists of words in all kinds of topics, put them in the database, and the game became a lot more fun. Right now there are over 20,000 words in the system, but they're in a few dozen categories and make a lot more sense. (Remember kids, if you copy information from one source, it's plaigarism. If you copy it from many sources, it's research.)

The game works best in teams, but you can play it with two people. My girlfriend and I play games like this a lot just ourselves. We try to help each other guess the word, and have a lot of fun with it.

So that's it, if you have any suggestions for improving the game play, or you have lists of words you'd like to have added, let me know. If people start actually using this, I'm going to set it up where you can load your own custom lists, and pick which categories you do and do not want.

And yes, one of my motivations for building this was to eventually make a class out of it. So the next time I do any ASP programming lessons, I'll show how this was built. It's not super hard. Again, if anyone is interested, comment below.

Thanks, and enjoy I'll Allow It!