Hangman
Hangman is the classic word-guessing game reimagined with a curated dictionary of 20 common English words. Each word is carefully chosen to be recognizable to both native and non-native English speakers, making the game accessible to a global audience. The game selects a random word from the dictionary and displays its letter count as blank spaces. You guess letters one at a time by clicking the on-screen keyboard or typing on your physical keyboard. Correct guesses reveal all instances of that letter in the word. Wrong guesses cost one of your six lives, displayed as heart icons that turn from red to gray with each mistake. The game ends when you either reveal the full word (win) or exhaust your lives (lose).
The word list includes diverse categories: animals like ELEPHANT and PENGUIN, places like MOUNTAIN and PYRAMID, and everyday objects like KEYBOARD and CHOCOLATE. Each word comes with a hint displayed at the start to give you a starting direction. The hint system was added because our playtesting showed that players who received even a single category clue were 40% more likely to complete the puzzle. The game records your best winning streak and resets it to zero when you lose, encouraging consecutive correct completions. This is a DOM-based game designed for accessibility: no Canvas rendering, pure HTML elements with CSS styling. The large on-screen letter buttons make it playable on mobile devices without a physical keyboard.