How to write a description worth 100 points
Barely Explained rewards precision, not obscurity. You want exactly one person to get it — and that is a trainable skill, not luck.
The mistake almost everyone makes
New players arrive thinking the goal is to hide the title. So they write something so generic it could be anything — "a man faces a problem" — nobody gets it, and they take a zero.
The goal is not to hide. It is to calibrate. You are aiming at one specific person in the room: the one who saw it, paid attention, and will recognize the detail you picked. Everyone who does not fit that profile needs to fall short.
A guy has a goal and a bunch of things go wrong on the way to reaching it.
A man spends the whole film trying to return a piece of family jewellery to where it came from, and the trip ruins him from the inside.
The peripheral-detail technique
The best raw material for a description is not the main plot. It is the secondary detail that only sticks with people who actually watched: an object that shows up three times, a scene with nothing to do with the story, a habit of a supporting character.
Describing the main plot is dangerous on both ends. It is the part that shows up in the trailer, so people who only saw the trailer get it too — and you drop to 10 points. A peripheral detail works like a key instead: obvious to anyone who watched, meaningless to anyone who did not.
- Describe the scene nobody puts in the summary but everybody remembers.
- Swap proper names for roles: "the older brother", "the boss", "the dog".
- Talk about how it feels rather than what happens — tone is a fingerprint.
- One specific number beats ten adjectives.
Read the room before you write
The same description scores completely differently depending on who is playing. Before you write, look at who is in the room.
| Situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| A title everyone knows by heart | Go for the most obscure detail you can remember |
| A title probably only one person has seen | Describe it almost straight — the risk here is the zero from nobody guessing |
| Big room (6+ people) | Close it down: at 5 correct guesses you are already at 10 points |
| Room of 3 | Beware the "everybody got it" zero — 2 correct guesses is enough |
Vague is not the same as confusing
There is a big difference between a vague description and a badly written one. The vague one hides the work's identity but still functions as a sentence. The bad one leaves you unable to tell what it is even talking about.
theres this thing and then it happens and at the end everything changes but i cant say
A group of very well-dressed people break into other people's sleep to steal ideas, and nobody is sure what they are standing on any more.
If the guesser cannot even form a hypothesis, you did not write something hard — you wrote something useless, and the scoreboard will agree.
Working around the forbidden words
The forbidden list is your friend, not your obstacle. It blocks exactly the words that would have given everything away — which means it does the calibration work for you.
- The check catches words inside words, so disguising with a plural or a diminutive will not work.
- Accents do not help you escape: the comparison strips them.
- Instead of hunting for a synonym for the forbidden word, change the angle of the sentence. If you cannot name the animal, describe what it does to people.
The other side: guessing better
- Guess without fear — a wrong guess costs nothing, and every correct one is worth 50.
- Note which categories the room enabled. If only movies and games are on, half your hypotheses are already dead.
- You do not need perfect spelling. The game tolerates typos and accepts localized titles, English titles and common nicknames.
- Pay attention to who wrote it. People describe the way they watch — someone who only watches animation leaves an animation-shaped trail.
A pocket summary
- 1Aim at one person, not the whole room.
- 2Pick the detail that is not in the trailer.
- 3Swap proper names for roles.
- 4Write a sentence that holds up read out loud.
- 5Re-read and ask: would someone who saw it click? Would someone who did not stay lost? If both answers are yes, send it.