A subject pours onto the plate one word at a time, rarest first. The common words — the ones that give it away — arrive last. Name it before the ink dries.
Every word in every cloud is counted from a real text. Nothing is invented and nothing is padded: if a word appears eleven times in the source, it is set at the size eleven earns. The silhouettes are drawn to hold type, which is a different craft from drawing a picture — a shape that reads beautifully at a glance may have no room inside it for a word.
Each minute carries one whisper, an epigraph offered free for the whole sixty seconds. Wrong guesses cost five.
Word pools are distilled from Wikipedia article text, CC BY-SA 4.0. Game design, code, prose and silhouettes are original works, © MMXXVI Macguffin Co. Your ledger of poured and named plates lives only in your browser — see Privacy.
A weekly letter from the pressroom — the week’s plates, the stories behind the dates, and what’s coming off the shelf next.