Good games for speaking practice? Online edition

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a puzzle game all about verbal communication and teamwork. One player tries to diffuse a bomb while the other player, who can see nothing except a PDF, asks them questions about what they see and gives instructions based on their answers. Here’s a clip of what that actually looks like, with a Japanese learner and English learner playing together.

In this case they’d decided to use the bomb expert’s native language (the diffuser’s target language) for each round. That’s probably a good idea if you try it, because the game wasn’t specifically designed with a language barrier in mind and the instructions in the manual are intentionally obtuse.

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