Evil Minds: Dirty Charades!

Review by eFreeware

Evil Minds: Dirty Charades is a free party word game from Super Massive Ventures Inc. built around a single phone passed between players. The pitch is a whole-body guessing game: one person faces away from the screen while everyone else yells or acts out clues for a hidden word. It has been on Google Play since March 2015 and carries a Mature 17+ rating, so it is clearly pitched at adults rather than family gatherings.

What makes it worth considering is how little it asks of a group. There is no board, no cards and no second device, just one phone and whoever is in the room. With over 2,000 words in the box and a tool for writing your own, it is the sort of thing that can fill twenty minutes at a party without any preparation.

A game built for one phone and a loud room

The premise is simple to explain and quick to start. One player is shown a secret Evil Word on the screen while the rest of the group tries to get them to say it, using shouted hints, gestures or a mix of both. The rounds are built around loud clues and wild guesses.

Because everything happens in the same room, the app is really a prompt generator rather than a full game system. It hands out words, counts points and moves on. That keeps the setup cost close to zero, which matters when you are trying to get a group of friends to play something on the spur of the moment.

It is also worth being honest about the content. The word list is described as evil, and the Mature 17+ rating backs that up. This is a game for adults who are comfortable with crude humor and don't mind shouting it across a living room.

How a round actually plays out

The guessing mode works like this. The guesser holds the phone up facing the group so they cannot see the word themselves. Friends start throwing clues, and once the word is named, the guesser tilts the phone downward to bank a point. If the word proves too hard, tilting the phone upward passes it. When the round ends, the phone goes to the next person.

The clue-giving mode flips the roles. Here the person holding the phone is the only one who can see the word, so they have to shield the screen from everyone else. They act and shout clues until someone in the group lands on the answer, then tap Next to confirm or Skip to move on. The phone is passed along again once the round is done.

That tilt gesture is the part I find most appealing. It means the guesser never has to look at the screen mid-round, so their hands stay free for gesturing and their eyes stay on their friends. It is a small design decision, but it is the kind of thing that keeps a party game from stalling while somebody hunts for a button.

The word list that keeps it going

Two things give the game its staying power. The first is volume: the developer lists more than 2,000 Evil Words, which is enough to get through a long evening without obvious repeats. The second is the option to write your own words, which lets a group fold in private jokes, in-jokes about friends or references that only the people in the room would understand.

That combination is what I would expect to make it last longer than a novelty. A fixed word list gets stale quickly in a regular group; a custom list lets the same group keep the game fresh by adding their own material. The developer also jokes that laughing this hard could cost you your teeth, which I would read as marketing rather than a medical warning.

The app has been updated as recently as August 2023, and the listed changes are bug fixes and performance improvements.

What it costs and what comes with it

Evil Minds is free to download, and it carries ads. It also offers in-app purchases, so there is a way to spend money inside the app if you choose to. I would not assume anything about the purchases before opening the app.

The Mature 17+ rating is worth flagging for anyone organizing a mixed group. This is not a game to hand to younger players or to bring out at a family dinner without knowing what the words are like. For an adult crowd that already enjoys crude party games, the free price makes it easy to try without committing.

A free party game for grown-up groups

Evil Minds: Dirty Charades is a narrow app, and that is fine. It does one thing: it gives a group of adults a stream of words to shout, act and guess at, using one phone and no equipment. With a 4.7 average across more than 4,600 ratings and over half a million installs, it has clearly found an audience that keeps coming back to it.

If you host gatherings where people are happy to make fools of themselves for a laugh, this is an easy thing to keep on your phone. It suits friend groups, parties and any setting where a loud, silly, adult-oriented round of charades would land well. If your idea of a word game is a quiet solo puzzle, this is built for the opposite situation.

What's new in version 1.5.9

Bug fixes and performance improvements.