Scattergories over a long game night: repeated categories, sticky settings, and a clock that can run slow

Setting up one fair Scattergories round is a solved problem: pick a letter that isn't cruel, choose how hard the categories should be, and give players roughly ten to twenty seconds per category. We've written that up already in running a fair Scattergories round, and if you're playing a single round with people who have never played before, that's all you need.

A game night is a different animal. Eight or ten rounds back to back surface problems that a single round never does — categories that come back around, settings that quietly persisted from the last time anyone opened the page, and a countdown that can lose time without anyone noticing. None of these are bugs, exactly. They're consequences of how the generator draws and remembers things, and once you know about them you can write two or three house rules that keep round nine as fun as round one.

Every round draws from the whole bank again

The generator has no memory of previous rounds. Each time you click New letter & categories it shuffles the entire category bank and takes the first N — nothing that appeared earlier in the evening is excluded. Categories are guaranteed unique within a round; across rounds, they're fair game.

The bank holds 322 categories, which sounds like plenty until you do the arithmetic. Drawing 12 categories per round from 322, the chance that round two shares at least one category with round one is about 37%. That compounds fast: by the time you've played five rounds, it is over 99% certain that some category has come back. Across ten rounds you'll have filled 120 category slots but seen only about 102 distinct categories — roughly 18 of those slots were things you'd already played, and you'll have touched under a third of the bank.

Whether that matters depends on your table. A repeated category on a fresh letter is a genuinely new puzzle: "Things in a kitchen" on B and on M have almost nothing in common. But a repeat does quietly reward the player who liked their earlier answer and has been sitting on it, and in a competitive group that's the sort of thing people notice on round seven and not before. The two workable house rules are "reroll if you spot a repeat from tonight" or "repeats are fine, but you can't reuse your own answer" — pick one before you start rather than adjudicating it mid-round.

Narrowing the difficulty tier shrinks the bank you're drawing from

The difficulty selector is usually discussed as a fairness dial — easy for kids, hard for a competitive table — and that framing is right as far as it goes. What it misses is that the setting also decides how deep your bank is for the rest of the night, because choosing a tier filters the pool before the shuffle rather than reweighting it.

The tiers are not evenly sized:

• Mixed — all 322 categories
• Medium — 132
• Easy — 102
• Hard — 88

Lock the generator to hard and you've cut your bank to a quarter of its size, which changes the repeat numbers dramatically. Two consecutive hard rounds share a category about 85% of the time — more often than not, before you've even finished round two. By round three a repeat is effectively guaranteed, and after ten rounds you'll have seen 68 of the 88 hard categories, so the last few rounds of the night are largely reruns. The easy tier is only marginally better at 102.

The practical conclusion is that the single-tier settings are best used as spice rather than as the setting for the evening. Run the night on mixed, and drop into hard for one or two deliberate rounds when the table wants a challenge. You get the difficulty you were after without burning through a small pool in the first half hour.

Difficulty describes the category, not the round

There's a related subtlety worth explaining to your players once, because it heads off a specific argument. The difficulty tag belongs to the category on its own, averaged across the whole alphabet — and the letter is drawn completely independently of the categories. The two draws never see each other.

So an "easy" category can produce an impossible cell. "Countries" is tagged easy, and deservedly: on B or S there are dozens of answers. On W, U, or Y it's close to a dead square. Meanwhile "Things that are sticky," tagged hard, is a gift on S. The tier you choose sets the average answerability of a category across all letters; it does not promise anything about tonight's pairing of this letter with this list. Expect variance, and expect one cell per round to be much harder than its tag suggests.

The letter draw has its own quirk on this front. With the default guard on, the generator draws uniformly from 23 letters — the alphabet minus Q, X, and Z. The boxed game's twenty-sided die is more aggressive, dropping six letters: J, Q, U, V, X and Z. That means the generator will hand you J, U, or V roughly 13% of the time, and those are rounds the physical game would never have dealt you. If your table finds those letters miserable, that's a known gap rather than bad luck, and the fix is a house rule — reroll on J, U, and V — since the exclusion checkbox only covers the three rarest.

The tool remembers your settings, including last week's

Every change you make in the options bar is written to your browser's local storage immediately and merged back over the defaults the next time the page loads. That's convenient and mostly invisible, but it has a consequence: whatever you set last time is what tonight starts with.

If your last session ended with a 30-second lightning round on the hard tier with 20 categories and the rare-letter guard switched off, the generator opens in exactly that state weeks later — and because the categories stay blurred until someone hits start, nothing on screen advertises it. The first round of the night is the one most likely to be played on settings nobody chose.

The storage is also per browser and per device. Running the game from the host's laptop gives one saved configuration; passing a phone around gives another; a guest's browser starts from the defaults of 12 categories, a three-minute timer, mixed difficulty and rare letters excluded. If your group swaps whose screen runs the game, the setup can change without anyone touching a control. Ten seconds glancing at the options bar before round one saves the whole "wait, why is this so hard tonight" conversation.

Changing an option doesn't change the board in front of you

This one catches people mid-session. Editing the options bar updates the saved configuration right away, but it does not regenerate the round currently on screen. Bump the category count from 12 to 16 and you'll still be looking at 12 categories, and the caption under the heading will still say 12, until you click New letter & categories.

The timer behaves differently, which is what makes it confusing rather than merely surprising: the duration is read at the moment you press start, so a timer you just changed does apply to the board already on screen. The category count is stale but the clock isn't. The reliable order is always: change your settings, reroll the round, then start. Never change settings on a board you're about to play.

The countdown counts ticks, not seconds

The on-screen timer works by subtracting one from a counter roughly once a second, rather than by comparing against the wall clock. As long as the page is visible and in front of you, the two amount to the same thing. When it isn't, they diverge.

Browsers deliberately throttle repeating timers in tabs that are hidden or in the background, and phones are more aggressive still — switching apps mid-round can slow the countdown down or stall it. Because the clock only advances when it gets a tick, throttling always errs in the players' favour: the round runs long, silently, and nobody gets a warning. If the screen running the game is also the screen someone is checking a message on, your three-minute round may well have been four.

The fix is procedural, not technical. Whoever holds the device running the timer isn't playing on it — hand it to a scorekeeper, keep the tab in front, and stop the screen from sleeping. If a round does get interrupted, reroll rather than argue about how much time was lost; the generator won't let you replay the same board anyway. Once the buzzer fires, the start button disables itself and reads "Round complete," so the only way forward is a fresh letter and a fresh list. That's worth knowing before someone asks for a do-over: there isn't one, by design, on a board everyone has already read.

A short checklist for the night

None of this needs to be complicated. Before the first round, check the options bar rather than trusting it — it holds whatever the last session left behind. Run the evening on mixed difficulty so the 322-category bank stays deep, and dip into hard for one or two rounds rather than the whole night. Agree up front on what happens when a category repeats, because after five rounds one will have. Change settings only between rounds, and always reroll after changing them. And give the timer to someone who isn't playing.

Our Scattergories generator is built to be the impartial third party at the table — it draws the letter, deals the categories, and runs the buzzer so no one has to referee. Knowing the handful of things it does and doesn't remember between rounds is what keeps it impartial across a whole evening rather than just the first game.