Stop the bus: random letter, timer and answers

A round starts with a tap on Draw a letter. After a spin of under a second, a random letter lands and the clock starts if a timer is set. Everyone writes one word beginning with that letter in each column of their sheet. The round ends when time runs out, when the first player to finish taps Stop!, or when someone taps End the round. The screen then lists example answers for the letter, column by column.

Take T, with the opening columns ticked. The first answers shown after the round are Thomas, Tajikistan, tiger, table, toast and turquoise, one for each column in order. Each column shows up to 6 examples, and when its list holds more, a link opens the rest in Find answers. A column of the group's own shows no list.

Under Columns, letters and timer, a round can last 30 seconds, 1 minute, 90 seconds, 2 minutes or 3 minutes, or have no timer at all. The page opens on 90 seconds, the site's own choice. The last 5 seconds tick, then three tones play and phones vibrate where the browser allows. The Sound and vibration switch turns both off.

Stop! ends the round at once by default. The setting After someone calls stop can instead give the others 10 seconds, 20 seconds or 30 seconds more to finish the word they are writing. Pause and Resume hold a timed round, and while one runs the screen stays on wherever the browser supports Screen Wake Lock. On a device set to reduce motion, the spin is skipped.

Stop the bus is played with pens, paper and one letter. Each player or team draws a grid with a column for every category, such as animals, colours, food, clothes, countries and sports. A letter is chosen, and everyone races to fill every column with a word beginning with it. The first to finish shouts "Stop the bus!" and all writing ends. Answers are read out and checked, points are given, and a new letter starts the next round.

In the British Council's TeachingEnglish version, first published in 2009, a class plays in teams of three or four. Each team finds one item for every category beginning with the set letter. If the team that stopped the bus has every answer right, it wins a point; if not, play carries on for a few more minutes. When a letter proves too hard, the teacher can let teams stop the bus with four columns.

The Scout Association's activity notes, written for a session on a video call, describe the same race. One person chooses a random letter, a timer runs, and the notes reckon a game with 12 categories takes about two minutes. Only unique answers score in that version, so the aim is a word nobody else thought of. The notes use the name Scattergories, a boxed game sold by Hasbro; this site has no link with that product.

On this page the phone plays the person with the letter and the stopwatch. It never reads or marks anyone's sheet: the group checks the answers, with the lists as a guide.

Each draw picks one letter from those still in the draw, every one equally likely, using the browser's cryptographic random numbers with rejection sampling. A letter never comes up twice in a game until all of them have been drawn, so the draw has no repeats. The page then says so, and New game, tapped twice, starts again with the full set.

At the start, 22 of the 26 letters of the alphabet are in the draw and Q, U, X and Z are switched off. These rare letters are this page's own pick: the ones whose opening columns the lists can fill least, counting at most 3 answers per column. Neither the British Council nor the Scouts name letters to leave out, and the Scouts' notes leave how tricky the letters are to the group.

U can look an odd letter to leave out. Beyond names and places, though, its opening columns hold only a few answers. The things are umbrella and umbrella stand, the food upside-down cake and Ulster fry, and the colours ultramarine and umber.

Any letter can be tapped off or back on under Columns, letters and timer, and Back to the usual letters restores the opening set. Of the letters left on, Y, V and I give the fewest answers across the opening columns.

As a random letter generator, the draw suits other word games too. The hot potato game on this site, for one, can pair a category with a starting letter while a single phone travels round a circle.

The page offers 16 columns with answer lists and starts with 6 of them ticked: four classic columns plus Food and Colour. Those four, name, place, animal, thing, give the game its other name. Ticking or unticking a column changes the answers shown after each round and the columns on a printed sheet.

Beyond those, the lists cover countries, cities and towns, rivers, jobs, plants, fruit and vegetables, sports, musical instruments, parts of the body and clothes. Place takes any country, city, town or river, so it holds the most answers of all: 3,306. Colour and Musical instrument hold the fewest, 106 each.

Groups can add up to 4 own columns of 24 characters at most, such as films or girls' names. They are kept in this browser only and print on the answer sheet. After a round they show "no list", since the page holds no answers for them.

Narrower alphabet game categories make a round harder. For higher levels, the TeachingEnglish activity swaps the basic headings for ones such as something in the kitchen or something made of metal. Any of them can be typed in as an own column.

For Q, the lists offer the names Quinn and Quentin and the place Qatar. The animals include quail and quokka, a quilt counts as a thing and quiche as food, but there is no colour. X gives the fewest answers of the letters switched off: nothing in the lists is a thing, a food or a colour beginning with it.

Other columns help with these letters. X has the xylophone under Musical instrument and the rivers Xingu and Xi. Z has the zither and the zookeeper, and Q has the quantity surveyor under Job.

Typed into Check an answer with Thing chosen, xylophone comes back as not in that list, with a note that the lists have it under Musical instrument. Whether it counts as a thing is for the group to decide, as with any word the lists leave out.

No federation or rulebook sets the points, so every scoring system is a house rule. The Scout Association's notes give 1 point for a unique answer, a word nobody else wrote, and 0 for an answer someone else also has. As a variation, they suggest 3 points for a unique answer and 1 for a shared one.

Take a player with 4 unique answers and 2 that someone else also wrote. Under the first rule the round is worth 4 points. Under the variation it is worth 14.

The score sheet takes 2 to 8 players. Each drawn letter adds a row, everyone's points for the round are typed in, and the totals and the leader update as play goes on. Remove the last row takes a row back, and Clear the scores, tapped twice, empties the sheet. The Scoring choice shows the rules as a reminder only: it never counts points itself.

Three more questions have no published answer, so each group settles them for itself.

• Duplicate answers: whether two players with the same word both score, score less or score nothing.
• Describing words: the Scouts' notes leave it to the group whether a green jumper counts as clothing beginning with G.
• Spelling: whether a misspelt word still scores when everyone can tell what it means.

Find answers lists the answers for any letter, rare ones included, in one chosen column or in all of them at once. Long lists open with a first batch and a Show all button, and each column heading says how many answers it holds. Cities outside the UK carry their country in brackets. The lists download into the browser only when the game first needs them.

Check an answer works once a single column is chosen. It says whether a typed word is in that column's list and warns when the word begins with another letter than the one picked. It also names any other column whose list holds it. Case, accents, spaces, hyphens and apostrophes are ignored, so "stoke on trent" finds Stoke-on-Trent. An accent never changes the letter a word counts for, which puts Ürümqi under U.

A word missing from the lists can still be right. They are a guide written for this game, not a dictionary or an official register, and the group has the last word.

The 2,701 cities and towns come from GeoNames, whose cities15000 file covers places of more than 15,000 people (CC BY 4.0). The list takes the UK's towns from that file, then the world's capital cities and its largest cities, UK places first and the rest by population. Places inside Greater London count as London, so its districts do not appear on their own. The English names come from GeoNames too.

The 441 rivers come from Wikidata, a database released under CC0. UK rivers come first, then the world's longest, each group led by the best known: those with articles in the most Wikipedia editions. The 195 countries are the UN member and observer states, with names taken from GOV.UK's Country names list, which follows the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (PCGN). That is why the list says Ivory Coast and East Timor.

Every other column is the site's own list: 2,309 answers written for British players in British spelling, family friendly, with no brands and no alcohol. In all, the game knows 5,646 answers.

Names, places and rivers are proper nouns, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as nouns that name a particular person, place or object and are spelled with a capital letter. The lists write them that way. Animals, things and food stay in lower case unless they hold a name, as in Yorkshire pudding.

The finder starts from a letter and a column. Making words out of a set of letters is a different puzzle, which the word unscrambler handles.

Print a sheet makes a blank answer sheet: a Name line, a Letter column, the columns ticked under Play and any own columns, then a Points column. It can have 10, 15, 20 or 26 rows, 15 at first, with a Total row at the foot. The longest version gives every letter of the alphabet a row.

With more than five columns the template turns to landscape. A second page with a score sheet for the players' names can be added, and everything prints through the browser's own print dialog.

Each player fills in a printed copy, while the phone draws the letters and keeps time for everyone.

The national curriculum in England does not name the game, but it lists skills a round uses. In year 1, part of key stage 1 (KS1), the Department for Education's English programmes of study ask pupils to name the letters of the alphabet in order. They also ask for a capital letter for names of people and places.

From year 1 to year 6, across KS1 and key stage 2 (KS2), the spoken language statements ask pupils to use relevant strategies to build their vocabulary. A round asks for a word in every topic under one letter, and reading the answers aloud afterwards puts new words in front of the whole class.

Place and City or town take any town, not only places with city status. GOV.UK's List of cities, published by the Cabinet Office in 2022, names 76 cities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, a figure the site counted from the list. The game's list also holds the UK's towns from the GeoNames file.

For the River column, the Environment Agency writes that the River Severn, at 354 km, might be the UK's longest river. The game puts UK rivers first, so the Severn opens the S list, followed by Spey and Stour.