What makes a good charades word?
Actions beat objects, and concrete beats abstract. “Fishing” is a whole performance — a rod, a cast, a wait, a fish — while “a fish” is one shape held in the air followed by thirty seconds of nothing. The entries that work carry a sequence inside them, because the person acting needs somewhere to go once the first gesture has landed.
The other test is whether everyone in the room has done it. A word only works if it is in the guesser’s head as well as the actor’s, which is why “brushing teeth” beats “developing film” at any mixed table. Cut anything a five-year-old has never seen, anything that needs a brand name, and anything abstract — “freedom” produces two minutes of arm-waving and one very quiet room.
Why should the wheel pick the word rather than a player?
Because the person supplying the word cannot play. Whoever holds the list or the deck is out of the game for the whole evening, and in a family of five that is a fifth of the room sitting out so the other four can guess. A wheel gives the word to exactly one person — the one about to act — and everyone else stays in, including whoever used to be handing out the cards.
It also stops the word being fitted to the actor. A person choosing knows who is up next and picks the easy one for the child and the impossible one for the brother who wins every year, and both are visible from across the table. The wheel does not know who is standing up, which makes an unlucky word bad luck rather than an accusation.
How do you play it with children who cannot read yet?
Put pictures on the segments instead of words. A child who cannot read a label can read a bicycle, and a wheel of six photographs is playable by a four-year-old with no adult reading anything out. It is also the version that holds a mixed-age table together, because nobody has to have their word whispered to them first.
Pictures change which entries are possible, though, so choose for the picture rather than translating the word list you already have. A photograph has to survive being cropped into a wedge and dimmed under a segment fill, so one plain subject on an uncluttered background works and a busy scene does not — and anything you cannot photograph unambiguously, like “waiting” or “tomorrow”, is not available on a picture wheel at all.
What else is this wheel good for?
It is the plain picker wheel with words to act out on it, so elimination and sharing behave exactly as they do there. For the version small children can play, the picture wheel puts an image on every segment instead of a label.
Draw a letter and let the players supply the word themselves and you are playing Scattergories. Draw the word instead of acting it out and the same evening is Pictionary.