60 Hard Charades Prompts

Amp up the difficulty with these challenging Charades words and phrases.

Like all party games, Charades is supposed to be about fun. Of course, some people take their fun very seriously. For experienced and highly competitive players, a typical game of Charades might turn out to be a walk in the park. And we wouldn’t want that now, would we?

Charades: The Complete Guide

Thinking of playing the classic pantomime party game? Sounds like… fun!

Fortunately, there’s one obvious way to make the game more difficult – give those hotshot players tougher phrases to guess. What makes a Charades prompt hard? It could be a phrase that’s more obscure than the typical fare, or it could be something familiar that’s simply difficult to pantomime effectively.

The following list of hard Charades words and phrases contains plenty of both. Read on to check out the word list and a few other ideas I have for increasing the difficulty of Charades.

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Hard Charades Prompts

Here’s a list of Charades words and phrases, from the just plain tough to the maddeningly difficult.

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Turning up the Difficulty

Harder prompts are really all you need to make Charades challenging for an experienced group. But if you’re looking for other ideas, here are a few:

Disallow conventional gestures. Anyone who’s played Charades before knows there are a number of established gestures that give players a head start on pinpointing the correct answer. To make the game more challenging, you may want to ban some of these shortcuts. I don’t recommend outlawing “natural” gestures, like pretending to open a book to indicate the phrase is a book title. I’m talking about the more contrived ones that Charades experts use to hone in on the answer, like gestures dealing with words and syllables.

Break up overpowered teams. This might fall under the category of common sense, but consider team balance before starting the game. Place more experienced players on teams with less experienced players. And above all, break up people who know each other extremely well, like best friends, siblings, and couples – their ability to read each other’s minds can be downright eerie!

Reduce the time. In some versions of Charades, players get three minutes to guess the correct answer. Whatever time limit you’re accustomed to, you can up the challenge by giving the players less time to work with. In the Charades rules on this site, I recommend one minute per turn.