How to play Crosstalk — free online one-word clue game
Give a one-word clue — but match a friend's and you BOTH get cancelled.
- Players
- 3–4
- Length
- ~8 min
- Type
- Clues
- Price
- Free
Crosstalk is built on one cruel rule: if you and a friend write the same clue, both clues are struck out and the guesser never sees either. The most obvious helpful word is therefore the worst thing you can write.
So you're solving two problems at once — be useful enough that the guesser lands the word, and original enough that nobody else thought of it. This is the Just One mechanic, and it's the reason the game is genuinely co-operative even though it feels competitive.
Clue-givers hold the secret word. Keep it off the guesser's screen, and never say it out loud.
Free, no app and no sign-up to join — players hop in with a 4-letter code on their own phone.
How to play Crosstalk
The host picks the round count
Eight rounds is the default. Five is quick; twelve is a long session.
One player becomes the guesser
The role rotates every round. The guesser never sees the secret word — everyone else does, delivered privately to their own screen.
Everyone else writes one clue
A single word. Not the secret word, not a variation of it, and ideally not the same word your friend just thought of.
Matching clues are struck out
Duplicates cancel each other before the guesser sees anything. If everyone converges on the same clue, the guesser gets nothing at all.
The guesser guesses
They see only the surviving clues and type one guess. Then the roles rotate.
What Crosstalk looks like
How scoring works
The room scores when the guesser lands the word, so this is a co-operative round wrapped in a competitive scoreboard — your clue is only worth anything if it helps.
Clues that get cancelled contribute nothing. Writing the most obvious word is the single most common way to cost your team the round.
Because the guesser role rotates, everyone spends the same number of rounds on each side.
Tips for winning Crosstalk
- Aim one step off the obvious. If the word is BEACH, everyone writes 'sand' — 'donkey' survives and still points somewhere useful.
- Think about who else is playing. The clue you'd expect your most literal friend to write is the clue you should avoid.
- Don't be so obscure you're useless. A surviving clue nobody can decode is exactly as valuable as a cancelled one.
- As guesser, work out what the clues have in common rather than chasing the strongest single one.
Frequently asked questions
How many players do you need for Crosstalk?
Three to four. You need a guesser plus at least two clue-givers for the cancelling rule to mean anything.
Is Crosstalk like Just One?
Yes — the duplicate-clues-cancel mechanic is the same idea. Crosstalk runs it in the browser with clues typed privately, so nobody has to hide a whiteboard.
Do we need to talk to each other?
No. Clues are typed, and the one thing that matters is that the clue-givers keep the secret word off the guesser's screen and out of the conversation.
Is it free?
Yes, free to play and free to host, and joining needs only the room code.
Free, no app and no sign-up to join — players hop in with a 4-letter code on their own phone.