How to Play Abracadabra 🎩

Abracadabra is a live riddle-and-guessing game for 3 to 20 players. One person becomes the Magician and hides a secret entity behind a cryptic riddle; everyone else races to crack it. The catch is that information is never free — every hint you pry out of the Magician, and every wrong answer you blurt out, costs you a precious heart. The clever players win, not the chatty ones.

It is designed to be played face to face over live video with your friends. You see and hear each other in real time, the riddle and every clue stay pinned to a shared board, and half the fun is reading the room while someone agonises over whether one more hint is worth one less life. Below is everything a first-time player needs to walk in and play with confidence.

Players & setup

Abracadabra works with as few as 3 players and scales comfortably all the way up to 20. Smaller groups feel tense and focused; bigger groups turn into a noisy guessing scramble where good clues get devoured fast. You need at least three people because you always want a Magician plus a couple of guessers competing.

Getting a game going takes under a minute:

• One person opens PlayParty and creates a room. The app generates a short room code.
• That code gets shared with the group — read it aloud on the call, or paste it into your chat.
• Everyone else enters the code to join the same room and turns on their camera and mic.
• Once the lobby is full, the host picks Abracadabra and starts the round. The app handles who becomes the Magician and tracks hearts, hints and scores for you.

Roles

The Magician

Exactly one player per round is the Magician. The Magician secretly chooses an entity — a famous person, an object, an animal, a place, a movie, anything the group will recognise — and writes a short, cryptic riddle that hints at it without giving it away. During the round the Magician answers hint requests from guessers and confirms whether each guess is right or wrong. The Magician never guesses; their job is to keep the secret alive for as long as possible.

The Guessers

Every other player is a guesser. Each guesser starts the round with 5 hearts, which are their lives for that round. Guessers study the riddle, optionally buy hints from the Magician, and try to name the secret entity. They are in a friendly race against each other — the first to nail it with hearts to spare walks away with the biggest prize.

How a round works

Here is a round from start to finish:

• 1. The Magician sets the riddle. They pick their secret entity and write a cryptic riddle about it. The riddle is posted to the shared board where every guesser can see it.
• 2. Everyone starts with 5 hearts. Each guesser begins the round with five lives. The board shows the riddle and, as the round goes on, every hint and every guess that has already been made.
• 3. On your turn, decide whether to ask for a hint. You may ask the Magician for one hint. Asking costs you a heart. The hint the Magician gives is added to the shared board for everyone to read — so a hint you pay for also helps your rivals.
• 4. Make a guess — or hold back. You can attempt to name the entity. A wrong guess also costs a heart. Since you can ask a hint and then guess on the same turn, it is entirely possible to spend two hearts in a single turn.
• 5. The board keeps the full history. The riddle, every hint, and every guess stay visible for the whole round. Late players benefit from clues others paid for, which keeps everyone in the hunt.
• 6. The round ends one of two ways. Either a guesser names the entity correctly and scores, or every guesser runs out of hearts. When the secret is finally revealed, the next round begins with a new Magician.

Scoring & winning

Scoring rewards efficiency. When you guess the secret entity correctly, the points you earn depend on how many hearts you have left at that moment. Solve it with all five hearts intact and you bank the maximum; claw your way to the answer on your last heart and you still score, but far less. Because hints and wrong guesses both burn hearts, the player who reasons it out with the fewest clues is the one who tops the board.

The Magician is not just a passive clue-dispenser. If every single guesser runs out of hearts before anyone cracks the riddle, the Magician scores instead — a reward for a riddle that was clever and stubborn without being impossible. That tension is the heart of the game: write a riddle too easy and a guesser scoops the points off you; write it too hard and players give up. A round ends when the entity is guessed or all hearts are gone, and points carry forward across rounds. After your group has played the agreed number of rounds, whoever has accumulated the most points overall wins the game.

Tips & strategy

• Guess before you buy. Hints are expensive and they help your rivals too. If the riddle already points somewhere, take the shot — a correct early guess with five hearts is worth the most points in the game.
• Read every hint on the board. Clues other players paid for are free intelligence for you. Before spending a heart, re-read the full history; the answer may already be sitting there in combination.
• Never spend two hearts on a hunch. Asking for a hint and then guessing wrong in the same turn drops you from five hearts toward zero fast. If you are not confident, take the hint and wait a turn before committing to an answer.
• As Magician, aim for "solvable but slow." Your best outcome is a riddle that drains hearts from everyone before someone finally lands it — or that nobody cracks at all. Lean on misdirection and double meanings rather than obscure trivia.
• Watch your rivals' hearts. If everyone else is low, you can afford to be patient and let them waste guesses. If someone is closing in, it may be time to gamble.
• Use the live video. A hesitation, a grin, or a frustrated sigh on camera tells you whether a guess is getting warm. Reading the room is a real edge that text-only games do not give you.

FAQ

Ready to make some magic? Grab your friends, hop on a video call, and start a room. When you have mastered the riddle game, browse the rest of our game guides to find your next favourite, or head back to the PlayParty home page to download the app and get the party started.