The rules in five lines
A letter is drawn at random. It holds for the whole round.
Five categories are announced, the same for everyone. Each player writes one answer per category, starting with that letter.
The first player to fill all five boxes ends the round. Everyone else stops immediately, even half-finished.
Answers are read out loud, category by category. A valid answer nobody else wrote scores two points, a shared answer scores one, an empty box scores nothing.
Draw a new letter and play again. A game runs five to ten rounds depending on the table's appetite.
How many players, how long
With two players it works but loses its bite: answers almost never collide, so almost everything scores two. From four players on, collisions start and the game becomes a race for the idea nobody else will have.
Past eight players, reading the answers takes longer than the round itself. Read every other category out loud and leave the rest to the scoring.
A round takes one to three minutes. Our real games run around eight minutes for five rounds, arguments included.
The forty classic categories
These work at any age and upset nobody. Draw five at random rather than taking the first five, or every round feels the same.
- First name
- City
- Country
- Animal
- Fruit or vegetable
- Job
- Object
- Brand
- Dish
- Sport
- Film or series
- Singer or band
- Item of clothing
- Musical instrument
- Body part
- Plant or flower
- Fictional character
- Drink
- Something in a kitchen
- Means of transport
- Capital city
- Something on a beach
- Toy
- Dessert
- Cheese
- Tool
- Historical figure
- Song
- Video game
- Adjective
- Verb
- Job that no longer exists
- Insect
- Bathroom item
- Something scary
- Something that rolls
- Something in a car
- Olympic sport
- Piece of furniture
- Something prickly
The forty party categories
Same rules, categories that make the table talk. They are written for adults who know each other: half the fun is in reading the answers out, not in the score.
- Excuse to leave early
- Reason for being late
- Something you hide from your parents
- Something you regret the next morning
- Nickname for your ex
- Terrible gift
- Something found under a sofa
- Message you delete straight away
- What you tell the taxi at 3am
- Banned in an open-plan office
- Something you do when nobody is watching
- Word you would not say at the table
- Job you would never admit to
- Something you take from a hotel
- What you shout at karaoke
- Shameful object in a teenager's room
- Reason to block someone
- Something you pretend to like
- First-date lie
- Found in a handbag at 2am
- What you say to be forgiven
- Likely cause of my death
- Something you have done drunk
- Reason you slept through your alarm
- Something hidden in your search history
- Nickname for your boss
- Found in a pocket after a night out
- Tattoo you regret
- Excuse not to pick up the phone
- What you text your ex at 3am
- Banned at a wedding
- What you take to a desert island
- Reason to cancel plans
- Something you do in other people's bathrooms
- What you eat at 4am
- Something you have stolen
- Reason to leave a group chat
- Something you regret posting
Which letters to draw, which to drop
Six letters empty the categories in French and waste a whole round: K, Q, W, X, Y and Z. Take them out of the draw. Twenty playable letters remain, A through V.
Three more deserve to be rare without disappearing: J, U and V. They produce short rounds where two people land on the same obvious answer. In our online game they come up three times less often than the easy letters.
If you draw by hand, write the twenty letters on slips and remove the one that just came up. Otherwise the same letter returns later in the evening and the second round is already played.
Scoring without arguing
The classic scale is two points for a unique answer, one for a shared one, none for an empty box. Some tables add a five-point bonus for whoever ended the round. We advise against it: it rewards writing anything quickly.
The real source of arguments is not the scale, it is validity. Two rules are enough. A contested answer goes to a show of hands, simple majority, no debate. A proper noun counts if at least one other person at the table knows it.
Score after every round, not at the end. Deferred scoring turns the last round into an accounting session.
Variants that hold up
Letter at the end. The answer must end with the drawn letter instead of starting with it. Harder, and best kept for tables that have already played three classic rounds.
Secret categories. Everyone whispers a category to the host, who draws five of them. Players discover their own at the same time as the others.
Single theme. Every category revolves around one subject: cooking, cinema, school. Works well for a birthday or a family meal.
Lightning round. Thirty seconds, three categories, nobody stops before time is up. A good last round to finish on a fast note.
On paper, printed, or online
On paper, each player draws a table of five columns and one row per round. That is the original version and it needs nothing but a pen each.
For printing, the most practical format is a blank grid where categories are written in by hand at the start of each round. A pre-filled grid locks the categories for the whole game and wears thin after three rounds.
Online, everyone plays from their own phone, the categories and the letter arrive at the same time for everyone, and scoring happens on its own. That is what we built, precisely because the friction in Petit Bac was never the game but the equipment: finding pens, drawing grids, deciphering other people's handwriting.