Hangman

Guess the word one letter at a time before the drawing completes. A classic word game with saved streaks.

The word game appears in print by the 1890s, and the letter-frequency strategy behind it is older still: ETAOIN SHRDLU, the order of English letter frequency, was familiar to typesetters because Linotype keyboards were arranged in it.

Frequency alone is beatable, though. A player choosing the word adversarially can defer committing — maintaining a set of candidate words consistent with every guess and only narrowing when forced. Against that strategy, guessing the most common letter is exactly wrong; the better move targets letters that split the candidate set rather than letters that are merely likely.