About upheads
An independent party game that runs in your browser, made by a small team in Istanbul. No app store, no accounts, no paywall — and no plans to add any.
Why this exists
Every party game we liked had the same problem: the moment you want to play, someone has to download an app, someone else has an old phone that will not run it, and by the time the group is ready the mood has passed. The game itself was never the bottleneck — getting to it was.
So we built the opposite. You open a web address, pick a deck and start. It takes about ten seconds and works on whatever phone happens to be on the table. One phone is enough for the whole room, which matters more than it sounds: it means nobody is staring at their own screen while somebody else is trying to make them laugh.
How the word decks are made
This is where most of our time goes, and it is less obvious than it looks. A word earns its place only if it passes three tests: you can act it out, most of the room will recognise it, and it can be guessed quickly. A word that needs a paragraph of explanation kills the pace; a word only one person at the table knows kills the round.
That standard means we cut things regularly. Our viral deck used to be nearly half generic video formats — "vlog", "unboxing", "reaction video" — which are technically viral content and completely unplayable. We replaced them with things you can physically perform: planking, the dab, a facepalm, someone salting a steak. When we added a pop music deck, single-word titles like "Taste" and "Golden" gave the clue-giver nothing to work with, so every entry now carries the artist as well.
We also watch what actually gets played. The decks that hold the top of the list are the ones people come back to, not the ones we thought were clever. Animals and food beat celebrities, consistently, because they need no shared cultural background — a seven-year-old and a grandparent can both play them.
Two languages, written rather than translated
upheads is fully bilingual in English and Turkish, and the decks are not translations of each other. A Turkish celebrity deck full of American actors would be unplayable in Istanbul, and a Turkish idiom deck makes no sense in English. Each language gets words chosen for the people who speak it, which is why the two versions differ in both size and content.
What we will not do
- No accounts. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to remember.
- No data collection beyond basic analytics. Your custom word deck lives in your browser and never reaches us — we cannot see what you played.
- No paywalled decks. Every category is unlocked. A party game that stops mid-evening to ask for money is a bad party game.
- No app. We get asked for one regularly. The whole point is that there isn't one.
How it is built
The game is a single self-contained page — no framework, no bundler, no third-party interface library. That is why it loads quickly on a poor connection at somebody's house and keeps working offline once it has loaded. The fonts are served from our own domain rather than a font network, so opening the page does not tell anyone else that you were here.
Tilt detection uses the phone's motion sensor, which is why you can answer by tipping the phone forward or back instead of tapping. If your phone has no sensor, or you decline the permission, tapping the top or bottom of the screen does exactly the same thing.
Who is behind it
upheads is made by a small independent team in Istanbul that builds and maintains a handful of games and apps. It is self-funded and supported by advertising on this site — which is also why we care that the game stays fast: an ad that interrupts a round is worse than no ad at all.
upheads is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Ellen DeGeneres' Heads Up! app, Hasbro's Taboo, or any other game of a similar format. It is an independent take on a party game format that has existed, in one form or another, for a very long time.
Getting in touch
Bug reports are the most useful thing you can send — tell us which phone and browser you used and what happened, and it usually gets fixed within days. Word suggestions are welcome too; several decks have grown from lists players sent in. Write to us through the contact form.
If you want to see exactly what the game contains before playing, the full word lists are published, category by category.