Games to Play With ChatGPT: 12 Copy-Paste Prompts (and the Trick That Stops It Cheating)

We played Hangman with ChatGPT after asking it to lock its secret word in Base64 before the first guess. The word was LANTERN, we solved it with two wrong guesses, and the code decoded to exactly that word. Without that one line, the secret word is never written anywhere, so you have no way to know whether the game was fair. That trick is the most useful thing to know about games to play with ChatGPT, and almost nobody mentions it.

Below are 12 games, each with a prompt you can paste straight in. There are word and guessing games, a picture puzzle, voice trivia, two board games, a story adventure and a party game for one screen. The last one is a Snake game that ChatGPT builds for you in a single file. We tested three of them on a ChatGPT Plus account, and where we did, you see the screenshots and what actually happened.

The Key Takeaways

• Lock the answer in: ask for the secret word in Base64 before you start. Our word, LANTERN, decoded exactly at the end.
• Picture games work: ChatGPT drew the elephant in the room as a guess-the-idiom puzzle, solved in one guess.
• It can build the game too: one prompt produced a working single-file Snake game with score, pause and restart, after 2 minutes 24 seconds of work.
• Put the rules in the first message: stating the board, turn order and scoring up front is what keeps the game on track.
• Which AI plays fairest? The same prompts work in other chatbots, so you can run them side by side and compare.

How to Play Games With ChatGPT

Open a new chat and paste a prompt that states the rules, your role, ChatGPT's role and how to keep score. ChatGPT then runs the game one turn at a time and waits for your move. A new chat matters: an old conversation drags its earlier context into the game, and a clean one starts from your rules only.

Three habits make almost every game here work better.

Write the rules in the first message. Word length, number of lives, who goes first, how many questions. Anything you leave out, ChatGPT decides for you.

Ask for the state every turn. Asking it to show the board after every move or keep a running score keeps the game visible, so a slip is easy to spot.

Lock anything secret. If ChatGPT holds a hidden answer, have it write that answer in Base64 at the start. More on that in the Hangman section.

None of this needs a paid plan to try. Text games are ordinary chat, so check what the free ChatGPT plan includes if you are wondering whether you will hit a wall halfway through a game.

All 12 Games to Play With ChatGPT at a Glance

Word and Guessing Games to Play With ChatGPT

1. Hangman, With a Lock That Keeps It Honest

Hangman is the classic, and it is also the game that shows the problem with playing against a chatbot. You never see the secret word until the end. If the word it reveals fits every letter it showed you, fine, but nothing on screen pins it down, so you cannot check. Our plain game ended on a word that fit every letter shown, which is the most a plain game can tell you. The fix is to have ChatGPT commit to the word before the first guess, in a form you cannot read at a glance.

That form is Base64, a standard way of rewriting text as letters and numbers. The RFC 4648 specification describes it as an encoding that "need not be human readable." It is not encryption, and any free decoder turns it back. That is the point: it works like a sealed envelope you open at the end.

Let's play Hangman. Pick a secret English word of 6-8 letters. Before we start, write the word in Base64 so I can't read it but can check it at the end. Then show me the blanks. I guess one letter at a time and get 6 wrong guesses.

Here is how our game went. ChatGPT printed bGFudGVybg== above seven blanks and waited.

After O and M missed, A, E, L and N filled in L A N _ E _ N, and LANTERN was the obvious guess. ChatGPT confirmed it with two wrong guesses used.

Then the check. Pasting the code into a Base64 decoder returned lantern, the same word ChatGPT had just confirmed. The game was provably fair.

2. 20 Questions, Both Ways Round

The easy direction is you thinking of something and ChatGPT asking. The more interesting one is ChatGPT holding the answer, and that is where the Hangman lock earns its keep a second time.

Let's play 20 Questions. I'm thinking of an object. Ask me yes/no questions one at a time, number them, and make your guess before question 20.

Now you think of a famous person and I'll ask yes/no questions. Before I start, write the name in Base64 so I can check it at the end. Number my questions and stay consistent with every answer.

3. Emoji Movie Puzzles

A good one for a quick break or for kids who are old enough to use ChatGPT, which by OpenAI's rules means 13 and up (more below). Ask it to wait for each guess, or it will reveal the answers in one long list.

Give me 5 movie titles as emoji puzzles, one at a time. Wait for my guess, give me a hint if I'm wrong, and keep score.

4. Would You Rather

Less a game than a conversation starter, but the second instruction turns it into something people actually want to keep playing.

Let's play Would You Rather. Give me hard ones, one at a time, and after each answer tell me what my choice says about me.

Picture and Voice Games

5. Guess the Idiom From a Picture

This is the game where ChatGPT does something a text list cannot: it draws the puzzle. We asked for an image hiding a well-known idiom and told it not to write the answer.

Let's play a picture guessing game. Generate an image that hides a well-known idiom, and I'll guess it. Don't write the answer.

It produced a photo of an elephant standing in a living room while five people chat on the sofas around it. One guess, the elephant in the room, and ChatGPT marked it correct and offered another round.

Each round is one generated image, so this game uses up whatever image allowance your plan has faster than any other here. Our guide to the ChatGPT image generator covers how that works.

6. Voice Trivia

Any quiz on this list works hands-free. In the ChatGPT app, start a voice conversation and say the prompt out loud. It is the best way to play in a car or while cooking, and the voice limits per plan are in our explainer on ChatGPT voice mode.

Let's play a quick trivia game out loud. Five questions about food from around the world, keep score, and read my final result at the end.

Board Games

7. Tic-Tac-Toe

Numbered squares turn every move into a single digit, which is faster to type than coordinates and leaves no room for a misread move.

Let's play tic-tac-toe. Draw the board with numbered squares 1-9. I'm X and go first. Show the board after every move and play to win.

8. Chess

Chess is the most ambitious game here, because ChatGPT has to track every piece for the whole game in text. Make it show the board every move and name any illegal move, including its own, so a mistake shows up the moment it happens rather than ten moves later.

Let's play chess. I'm white. Track the position in standard notation and show the board after every move. Tell me if either of us makes an illegal move.

Story and Quiz Games

9. A Ten-Minute Mystery Adventure

Choose-your-own-adventure is where ChatGPT is most fun, because it can react to anything you choose. The two constraints in this prompt, three choices per turn and a real ending, stop the story from drifting forever.

Run a 10-minute choose-your-own-adventure mystery set on a night train. Give me 3 choices each turn, keep track of the clues I've found, and bring the story to a real ending.

10. A Levelled Trivia Quiz

Multiple choice keeps it quick, and the rising difficulty gives the quiz a shape. If an answer surprises you, ask for a source; trivia is where a confident wrong answer is easiest to miss. It also helps to know why the same prompt gives different answers, since a rerun of this quiz will not repeat itself.

Quiz me: 8 questions about space, getting harder. One at a time, multiple choice, keep score and tell me my final result.

A Party Game for One Screen

11. ChatGPT as the Party Host

Multiplayer used to mean ChatGPT's group chats, but OpenAI stopped new group chats from 9 July 2026, and existing ones are becoming read-only. The workaround is one laptop and a host prompt. Put the players' names in the first message and start each answer with a name, so the scoreboard stays straight.

You're the host of a party quiz. The players are Anna, Tom and Priya, sharing one screen. Ask one question at a time and say whose turn it is. We'll answer as "Name: answer". Keep a scoreboard by name and announce the winner after 3 rounds.

If kids are joining in, OpenAI's terms of use set the minimum age at 13, with a parent's permission needed under 18. Our guide to ChatGPT for kids covers the parental controls.

Build Your Own Game With ChatGPT

12. Build Your Own Snake Game

The last game is one ChatGPT makes rather than plays. A browser game in a single HTML file needs no installs and no coding on your side. This was our prompt:

Make a complete Snake game in a single HTML file. Arrow keys to move, score in the corner, restart button. Give me the whole file.

On our Plus account, ChatGPT moved the chat into Work, which OpenAI describes as an agent for longer, more involved tasks. It worked for 2 minutes 24 seconds, and our guide to ChatGPT Work explains what that mode is. It came back with a snake.html file and a note that everything is contained in one file and works offline. The preview showed a finished game with a score counter, a restart button, Space to pause and on-screen arrow buttons.

To play it yourself:

1. Paste the prompt into a new chat.
2. Download the HTML file ChatGPT returns. If it gives you code instead of a file, copy all of it into a plain text file and save it as snake.html.
3. Double-click the file to open it in your browser, and play.
4. Ask for changes in the same chat: faster speed, walls that wrap around, a high score that survives a restart.

Which AI Plays Games Best? Test It Yourself

Everything above was played in ChatGPT, and the prompts are not tied to it. The interesting question is which chatbot is the best game partner: which one keeps a Base64 promise, which tracks a chess board longest, and which writes the Snake game that runs first time. The only way to know is to play the same game against each of them.

Fello AI makes that easy. It puts GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and more in one app on Mac, iPhone and iPad. Paste the Hangman lock prompt into several models side by side, decode each one's word at the end, and see who played fair. It also generates images, so the idiom game works there too.

There is a free tier to start with. Try the three games we tested, Hangman, the idiom picture and the Snake build, and you will have your own answer rather than someone else's ranking.

The Verdict

ChatGPT is a good game partner for anything built on words, stories and pictures, and it will build you a simple game on request. Where it holds a secret, do not take the game on trust: one line asking for the answer in Base64 turns a win you have to take on trust into one you can check. Start with Hangman and the lock, because it takes two minutes and tells you more about playing with AI than any other game on this list.

Frequently Asked Questions