How to play List Rush
List Rush is played in short rounds against a shared clock. One person creates a room and shares the four-character code; everyone else joins from their own phone or laptop, up to fifteen players in all. When the host starts a round, the game draws a single random letter and shows the same list of categories to everyone at once, then the timer starts counting down.
Your job is to fill in every category with an answer that begins with that letter. If the letter is T and the category is “things in a kitchen”, you might write toaster, teapot or tongs. You type as fast as you can, because when the clock hits zero every answer is locked in exactly as it stands.
The twist is in the scoring, and it is what makes List Rush more than a race. You do not score for simply having an answer; you score only for answers that nobody else in the room wrote. If three people all put down toaster, none of them get the point, and the player who remembered tandoori is the one who scores. That single rule pushes you away from the obvious and toward the answers other people will miss, which is where the game gets its personality.
Rounds repeat with a fresh letter each time, scores carry over, and the highest total when you stop wins. There is nothing to install and no account to make; a browser tab is the whole game.
List Rush versus Scattergories
List Rush is built in the spirit of Scattergories, the Hasbro category game, and if you know one you will feel at home in the other. The core loop is the same: a letter, a list of categories, a timer, and the tension of racing to fill the sheet. What List Rush changes is the format. It is free, it runs in a browser with nothing to install, it scores every round automatically, and it works across a room or across the country, which suits coworkers on a call or friends in different cities. There are no dice to pass, no answer pads to print, and nobody has to be the referee.
The board game still does some things better, and it is worth being honest about them. Rolling the twenty-sided letter die and flipping the sand timer is a tactile ritual a screen cannot reproduce. Sitting around a table, reading answers aloud and arguing over whether “a hot dog” counts as a sandwich, is where much of the fun lives, and that face-to-face energy is hard to match online. And the box needs no devices, no wifi and no one dropping off the connection mid-round. If you own it and everyone is in one room, reach for it. If you do not, or your players are scattered, List Rush gives you the same idea in seconds.
Category lists and letters
Every round starts with a single letter, drawn at random from a set that leaves out the ones that make a game miserable. X, Q and Z are left out of the draw, so every letter you see is one you can actually play.
The categories are a deliberate mix. Some are wide open and some are narrow enough to make you sweat, and a single list blends the two so there is always somewhere to score fast and always somewhere that separates the room. A typical list looks like this:
- A country
- Something in a fridge
- A movie title
- A reason to leave a meeting early
- An animal at the zoo
- A brand of car