The best games to play with an AI chatbot are ones built on words and imagination: 20 Questions, Would You Rather, riddles, trivia, murder mysteries, story games and text adventures. Chatbots are tireless game partners and they never run out of material. They’re bad at games that depend on individual letters, like hangman and Wordle, and they can’t truly keep a secret. Below are 15 games that work, with a prompt for each, plus the ones to skip.
Every prompt here works with the small models that run offline on a phone, which makes them good for flights, road trips (for passengers) and waiting rooms with no signal.
Quick guessing games #
1. 20 Questions (you think, AI guesses) #
Let’s play 20 Questions. I’m thinking of something. Ask me one yes-or-no question at a time and try to guess it in 20 questions or fewer. Keep count.
This version works best, because you hold the secret. Small models sometimes guess wildly early; tell them “narrow it down first.”
2. Guess from clues #
Think of a country. Give me one clue at a time, from hardest to easiest. After each clue, wait for my guess. Tell me the answer only if I give up after 5 clues.
Swap “country” for an animal, a movie, a famous landmark or a food.
3. Emoji puzzles #
Describe a well-known movie using only emojis. I’ll guess the title. Give me a hint if I get it wrong twice.
4. Two truths and a lie #
Tell me three surprising facts about octopuses. Two are true and one is false. Don’t tell me which is the lie until I guess.
Pick topics you can check afterwards. A small model can get “true” facts wrong without meaning to, which we explain in why AI makes things up.
Quiz and brain games #
5. Trivia on any topic #
Quiz me on world geography. Ask one multiple-choice question at a time with four options, wait for my answer, tell me if I’m right, and keep score out of 10.
Great for studying, too. Treat surprising answers as something to double-check rather than gospel.
6. Riddles #
Give me a riddle. Wait for my answer. If I’m wrong, give me a hint. Only reveal the answer if I say “I give up.”
If you ask the AI to solve riddles you give it, turn on thinking mode. Step-by-step reasoning helps a lot with logic puzzles, as we explain in AI thinking mode explained.
7. Would You Rather #
Play Would You Rather with me. Give me two options that are both tricky to choose between, keep it family-friendly, and after I answer, tell me what my choice says about me in one funny sentence.
8. Argue the other side #
I’ll state an opinion. Argue against it as convincingly as you can in three sentences, then I’ll reply. After three rounds, say who made the stronger case.
Pick low-stakes opinions (“pineapple belongs on pizza”) for fun, or real ones to practice debating.
Story and role-play games #
9. Murder mystery #
Create a murder mystery set in a 1920s country house. Introduce five suspects with one-line descriptions. I’m the detective. I can question suspects or examine rooms. Decide the culprit now and keep the clues consistent with it. Reveal everything only when I make an accusation.
10. Text adventure #
A classic choose-your-own-adventure where you type what you do and the AI narrates what happens. It’s the deepest game on this list, so it has its own guide: play an AI text adventure offline.
11. Story ping-pong #
Let’s write a story together, one or two sentences each. You start with a sentence set on a space station. Keep it surprising, and don’t end the story until I say “The end.”
12. Interview a historical figure #
Pretend you’re Ada Lovelace in 1843. I’m a newspaper reporter interviewing you. Stay in character, and if I ask about something that happened after your time, act confused.
A fun way to learn, as long as you remember the “facts” are the model’s best guess.
13. Tabletop RPG helper #
If you run Dungeons & Dragons or another tabletop game, a chatbot is a great prep partner even if it isn’t the game master:
Give me five tavern names for a fishing village, each with a one-line description of the owner and a rumor they might share with players.
Ask for NPC names, loot tables, shop inventories or a riddle for a locked door. Offline AI is handy at the table, where the Wi-Fi is often bad.
Party games #
14. Charades and Pictionary prompts #
Give me 20 charades prompts for a family game night: a mix of movies, animals and actions. Easy to act out, nothing scary.
15. Word association #
Let’s play word association. I’ll say a word, you reply with the first related word, then I reply to yours. If either of us repeats a word, that player loses. Start with “ocean.”
Games that don’t work well with AI #
Knowing these saves frustration:
- Hangman, Wordle, anagrams and crosswords. Language models read text in chunks called tokens, not letter by letter, so they miscount letters and misspell hidden words.
- Games where the AI keeps a secret. A chatbot has no hidden memory. When it “thinks of” a word, nothing is stored, so it can quietly change its mind to fit your guesses. Hold the secret yourself where you can, or check at the end that its clues fit its answer.
- Chess and other board games. Models describe moves confidently and then make illegal ones. Use a real chess app.
- Anything scored with arithmetic over many rounds. Keep score yourself if it matters.
How to make AI games better #
- Start a separate chat for each game, so rules from one don’t leak into another.
- Put the rules in a system prompt if your app supports it. The model will follow them more consistently than rules buried in a long chat. See system prompt examples.
- Raise the temperature for creative games. A creative setting gives more surprising stories and riddles. Lower it for trivia so answers stay factual. Our guide to getting better answers from local AI explains the settings.
- Remind it of the rules if it drifts in a long game. Small models forget instructions from much earlier in a conversation.
Play AI games offline on your phone #
Personal LLM runs AI models on your phone with no account and no internet once a model is downloaded, so games work on a plane or in the back seat with no signal. Each chat can have its own system prompt, so your mystery game and your trivia quiz keep their own rules, and one-tap presets switch between Creative for stories and Precise for quizzes. It can also read any answer aloud with on-device text-to-speech, which is handy for passengers playing 20 Questions on a road trip. Qwen 3.5 4B is a good all-rounder on most phones, and Qwen 3.5 9B tells richer stories on phones with 8 GB of RAM or more.
For more non-game ideas, see things to ask an AI chatbot.
Frequently asked questions #
What games can you play with ChatGPT or other AI chatbots? #
Any game built on conversation: 20 Questions, trivia, riddles, Would You Rather, two truths and a lie, murder mysteries, story games and text adventures. Word games that depend on spelling, like hangman and Wordle, work poorly.
Can AI play 20 Questions? #
Yes, and it’s best when you think of the answer and the AI guesses. When the AI is the one thinking of something, it has nowhere to store the secret, so its answers can drift. Ask it to stay consistent and check at the end whether its clues fit.
Why is AI bad at Wordle and hangman? #
Language models process text in tokens, which are often whole words or word pieces, not individual letters. That makes counting letters, placing them in positions and spelling hidden words surprisingly hard for them.
Are AI chatbot games safe for kids? #
The games themselves can be, with supervision. Set a system prompt asking for family-friendly content, keep the chat on a shared device, and remember that small models can say odd or wrong things. An offline app also means kids aren’t sending anything to a company’s servers.
Can I play AI games without internet? #
Yes, with an app that runs the model on your phone. Once the model is downloaded, the games work in airplane mode.