Hangman is a word guessing game, usually played by two people with pencil and paper. Hangman_SG saves paper and eschews the distasteful traditional pictorial representation in favour of a fruit-bearing tree. Child-friendly, yet challenging, the program contains a list of 55,000 words carefully arranged into 17 families based on their frequency of use. Using a secret formula which classifies them on letter frequencies the words in each family are also ordered into 10 difficulty classes thus providing the game with 170 levels. There is also the option to read in external word lists, so for example, teachers could load a specific vocabulary for pupils to use. The program can be downloaded for free from this site.
- 55,000 words
- 170 difficulty levels
- Ability to load personal word lists
- Option to set allowed number of errors
- Choice of case
- Child-friendly
- Timers/counters
- Keyboard and screen input
- Free download for Linux and Windows
- Source code included
February 18th 2011
Latest changes described here.
A typical view of the program can be seen in Figure 1. This shows a game in which the user has chosen a maximum error count of 5 and has started to guess the letters in the word selected by the program. So far she has had 6 guesses, getting 4 correct and 2 wrong. Each time an incorrect guess is made a fruit disappears from the tree. Guesses can be entered by clicking on the buttons displaying letters or by using the keyboard. They can be displayed using upper or lower case. If any incorrect guesses are made after all the fruit have gone, the game is lost. The time taken for the current word, the average time and the number of consecutive words guessed correctly is displayed.
A complete and detailed list of the program's options is given here.
