Listen to the author reading this blog post.

by Kate Woodford

Do you like learning English by playing games? Here at Cambridge Dictionary, we now have a Games Hub with daily word games so you can practise your English in a way that is both fun and motivating. To mark the arrival of our fabulous games, we thought we’d take a look at the language that people often use when they’re playing games.

Let’s start with the basics. When you’re playing a game with other people, it is your turn or go when it is your time to move an object, put a card down, etc. Players take turns (and in UK English also take it in turn) when they each move an object, put down a card, etc. one after the other:

Whose turn is it? 

Have you had your go, Sophie?

If you can’t play a card, you miss a turn.

In this game, players take turns removing a block from the tower.

The object that we move in a board game is called a counter or a piece. If the object looks like a human, some people now call this a meeple (a word formed from a combination of ‘my’ and ‘people’, originally invented for use in the game Carcassonne):

Place your counters on ‘Start’.

Each player moves their piece around the board.

Some games feature dice – small cubes with spots on each side. (Interestingly, the singular form of this word is die, though most people say dice for singular and plural.) We roll or throw the dice (or die):

Players take turns to roll the dice.

Other games feature cards. When we deal or deal out cards, we give them to the players at the start of a game. If we draw a card, we take one from the pack (or US deck) and we discard it when we get rid of it. We play a card when we put it down, showing the card’s value to other players, and we shuffle the cards when we mix them before a game:

Deal six cards to each player.

Each player draws three cards from the deck and discards one.

James hasn’t played a card yet.

I don’t think these cards have been shuffled.

A lot of games require one of the players to keep score, meaning record how many points each player has won:

Lucy, can you keep score?

Some games involve luck and chance, while others require strategy – the skill of planning in order to achieve success:

Chess is a game of strategy, not chance.

Most people play by the rules, but now and then a player may cheat, that is, behave dishonestly to gain an advantage:

If my brother was losing, he would start cheating.

We hope you’ve learned a few new items of games vocabulary from this post. Are you a keen games player? We’d love to hear below what your favourite game is. And be sure to check out the new Games Hub!