Gibberers: The Word Game of Language Invention and Civilization Development

Players portray early humans who encounter outsiders and jointly invent a new language that expands across eras from Stone Age to Futuristic Age. The game plays like field linguistics: players create vocabulary, assign meanings, and evolve that lexicon over successive rounds and generations, with communication restricted to the invented language for most of play. Play begins with a zero generation session where the group builds core vocabulary using cave-painting postcards and one player serves as Mentor. Afterward, players run a fixed number of rounds across multiple generations, developing civilization via a tech-tree–style progression and earning development tokens that determine scoring and the final win condition based on guessing a target word. An expert variant extends the number of rounds and generations and relaxes communication limits while adjusting scoring.

Players: 3–5 best 5
Playing time: 60–180 min
Age: 14+
Complexity: 2.5 / 5