The game Gibberers seems to have become an instantaneous cult game among language nerds, but also among more ordinary people – and for a good reason. The goal of the game is to create a new ‘language’, or perhaps a medium of interethnic communication, so that your group or your created civilization can communicate with some kind of invaders from far away. Could it be aliens? Yes. The guests could also be refugees or imperialists from elsewhere on Earth.
It took us a long time to get hold of a copy when I first heard about it on May 31st this year. At the UK Games Expo 2025 this fall, the 100 copies the seller had brought were all sold within an hour. After that, a limited number of copies could be found for sale for rather outrageous prices from some individuals. We finally got one in November through the Games store in Aarhus, where we had ordered it, and we do not know how they got it. They said they also got some promotional material, which the store decided not to keep but to give to the buyer. Thank you. As it turned out, it was not promotional material, but the English-language materials that you really need if you do not know Japanese. If you choose to buy the game, make sure you learn Japanese or, alternatively, that you get the English supplementary cards and rule books.
The game was developed in Japan, and the Japanese version is fairly easy to get, but less easy to understand for the 8,177.212.345 people on Earth who do not know how to read Japanese. For a quarter of those on Earth who know (some) English, there is a supplement with English (more on that later) manuals. Yes, there are two manuals: one for ordinary mortals, and one for “experts”, whatever that means.
So, we recently tried to have a go at it and played the game. Despite the fact that all five players were trained linguists with a special interest in new languages emerging from heavy contact situations (such as pidgins), we chose to follow the rules of the simple version. It was a lot of fun, but not always easy to grasp the rules from the rule book. The Japanese rules may be clearer and more grammatically correct than those printed, as you can see in these actual examples:
Students (all players accept a Mentor) add a number of Enlightment Token to the Center of the Civilization Board according to the Generation of the Knowledge Card drawn by the Mentor. Add five tokens for Generation, 1, 4 for Generation 2, and 3 for Generation 3.
Knowledge Cards in Generation 1 and 2 will have a verb or adjective written behind a noun. Mentor only need to explain the Noun written.
It may be the case that we did not quite follow the rules as described and stretched them a bit as we advanced in the game, but why not? It is the fun that counts. And in the end, we all won. In this game, you either win as a group, or you collectively fail, depending on whether you are able to communicate successfully throughout tens of thousands of years of linguistic and cultural evolution within the space of an hour.
Gameplay
We think we played for three hours. The game drew on in length partly because we often laughed so hard when we tried to utter the various creative solutions. Needless to say, with playful language contact specialists as creators of the new language, this unavoidably led to the inclusion of quite a number of unusual phonemes or rather difficult phonetic strings. Phonetic strings are sequences of speech sounds, popularly known as words. For instance, the phoneme inventory of the language (that is, the speech sounds used in a language), the players created a word that included the nasal-ingressive voiceless velo-pharyngeal trill (a yet unrecognized phonetic symbol), in this case a single-phoneme word meaning ‘to hit’ in our language.
In the game, there are three levels of development for your civilization: you start at some stone/bronze age kind of society at Generation 1, where you have to communicate with just 18 words in the beginning, plus gestures, and every round, the group’s vocabulary increases. Then some medieval-like society develops in Generation 2, and finally, you find yourself in a modern society with for example refrigerators (ĩõ in our language) in Generation 3. We admit that we first found out about the various stages of development after the game had ended. The experts’ version also includes 4th and 5th generation words and phrases like “nuclear fission”, “perpetual motion” and “noblesse oblige”. It was good that we played the simple version.
There were also some gadgets belonging to the game (tokens, cards) that we did not use, as we never found out what their function was.
According to the rules, 3-5 players can participate. In the 1st phase, the collective starts with 18 phonetic strings/words without meanings. You also have to agree on a name for your civilization. In our case, we settled on the name Habeka. Only four words (out of the 18 you create at this stage) have to have a fixed and obligatory meaning in the very first round: FIRST PERSON/I, KNOW, NO and YES, for which we ended up with ŋitu:ni, klapateka, napa and kivivi respectively. Now you can understand the title of this post! Then we had to assign meanings to the rest of the words that we had come up with, and so we did.
We also had to give ourselves personal names at this stage, using the 18 words and meanings we had just created. We played with BIGBIGBIG (in our language: Las-Las-Las), GO-LUCKY (Blur-Wag), GOOD-MAKE (Dulan-Opika), EAT-BIG (Koko-Las), SPEAK-NO-BIG (Gəlɛp-Napa-Las) alias ‘the silent one’. And then you can tell your name, and express whether you do or do not understand.
The fun already begins here, as you have to agree on the meanings of the 18 words. This part is crucial, since you have to create a (minimal) vocabulary for your emergent language. It is tricky too, as you have to make sure that the phonetic strings/words should be chosen so as to be as general and useful as possible. On top of that, you are not allowed to use words from a language you know. Our word for ‘to speak’ was also used with the meanings ‘language’, ‘talk’. ‘speech’, ‘say’, etc. Besides gestures, these are the only words you are allowed to use in order to communicate with your co-players to make them guess the meanings. That is why the meanings had to be as broad and usable as possible.
In the following stages in the game, the goal is to expand the vocabulary of the language, so it is easier to communicate with one another, but with increasing restrictions. To this end, you have to make the other players guess the meaning of new words (you only know the phonetic string), but that must be done by using only the basic 18-word vocabulary decided on earlier. In the beginning you can also use gestures. Every time a new word is guessed correctly, it then becomes part of the new language’s lexicon. This part is simply hilarious.
Our patterns
Playing the game can also be subject to scientific analysis in several ways: do the people create recurrent grammatical patterns, like fixed orders? How much can you express with so few words? What are the minimal requirements for a language to function?
So, what did we linguists learn? We cannot really say that a stable grammar developed after playing for three hours and going through three generations. But some strategies were definitely adopted by the whole group very early on in the game, such as the frequent use of reduplication to indicate ‘more of the same’, e.g. dulan ‘good’ and then dulan-dulan ‘very good’. Likewise, reduplication was used to expand on the pronominal system: with only two personal pronouns (ŋitu:ni 1SG and mi 2SG), we were able to express the 1PL and 2PL (ŋitu:ni-ŋitu:ni and mi-mi respectively), with even a possible inclusive/exclusive distinction (the tripled forms equivalent to an inclusive). Through compounding, we created the new verb ‘to show’ as opika-munik (‘to make’+’to see’) and similarly, the verb ‘to make’ was quickly adopted as a causative marker. There was also a quick consensus on using the transparent rising intonation for marking questions. The language seemed to be predominantly SVO in structure and had preverbal negation, albeit with some variation. We were only communicating in a pre-pidgin, with no clear strategy and no apparent rules. We developed one grammatical marker, a habitual aspect marker, after one of the players had to laboriously make the others guess the verb “to continue” by repeating all the different verbs ten or more times. This was of course glossed according to the Leipzig Glossing Rules as HAB on the sheets of paper.
Another observation was that our language did not support Zipf’s law, the inverse relationship between word length and frequency discovered by Zipf (i.e. the most frequent words in a language also tend be the shortest ones). In our language of the Habeka civilization (‘habeka-gəlɛp‘), it is the other way around: the most frequent items were actually also the longest ones (e.g. the most frequent word in the language, klapateka ‘to know’, was also the longest one).
It would also be a challenge to make a phonemic inventory (a list of speech sounds) for the language as it includes words like j for ‘wine’, ĩõ for ‘refrigerator’, ʘiʕiʕi for ‘blood’, ʡˀɘɽ for ‘food’, beside lar for ‘to grow’ or gavala for ‘to sleep’.
Another observation to make is that we were pretty good in choosing basic words, as we had knowledge of the Swadesh lists (list of 100 or 200 supposedly basic word meanings extant in all languages) and the principles of Natural Semantic Metalanguage. That is the theory that says that all words and all concepts of the world can be expressed in 65 primes for which there are words in all languages of the world, and which cannot be reduced further. By combining these words/primes, anything can be said in any language. I think this gave us an advantage. Naturally, this will be more difficult for players less versed in typology and language contact studies, than for this group of elite scientists.
Practical information
If you want to learn more, you can watch a video on how to play the game in 15 minutes.
The game is highly recommended by us.
If you want to get a copy of the game before Christmas, it may be difficult to get one. The Games store network is your best bet, with stores in Aarhus and Copenhagen, and you can order by mail. It costs 449 DKK, but that is still a lot cheaper than some copies on the Black market in Germany and Britain. The Games store gives free postage over 500 DKK.
Peter Bakker is a linguist employed at Aarhus University. He likes to play games, but only in a literal sense. He has studied pidgins extensively, which are rudimentary oral or signed communication systems that emerge in situations of sudden contact in multilingual situations.
Aymeric Daval-Markussen is employed as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Linguistics at Aarhus University under the project ‘Digital demography, creole creation, light on letters’. His primary research interests lie in linguistic typology, historical linguistics and language contact studies, with a particular focus on high-contact language types such as creole languages. He specialises in the application of phylogenetic tools and quantitative analysis of linguistic data and has published a wide range of articles on the subject.
The authors thank Las-Las-Las, Dulan-Opika and Gəlɛp-Napa-Las from the Habeka civilization for their input.
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ŋitu:ni napa klapateka! Et spil til hurtigt at skabe et nyt sprog. Din julegave?