nzinov/the-hat-games

The Hat — Anonymized Games

Real gameplay records from The Hat (Шляпа) — a word-explanation party game where one player explains a word while a teammate races to guess it before the timer runs out. Learn about the game at the-hat.appspot.com.

Each row is one game: the words that came up, who explained to whom, how long each explanation took, and whether it was guessed. It's a rich source for studying word difficulty, explanation time, and turn-taking dynamics.

Privacy

Every record is anonymized. The following are removed and verified absent from the data: player names, device and app information, and absolute dates/times (when a game was played). Only relative per-explanation durations are kept — never wall-clock time.

Players appear only as a within-game index (Player 0, Player 1, …), which is stable inside a single game (so turns and per-player behavior are preserved) and carries no meaning across games.

Every word in the dataset comes from the game's shared word list. Games in which a player entered their own custom word are excluded entirely, so no user-authored text is present.

Schema

field	type	description
game_id	string	Synthetic sequential id (game_000001, …).
ignored	bool	The game was flagged as low-quality (aborted, too few words, explanations too quick, …). Kept so you can filter it out if you want only clean games.
ignored_reason	int / null	Reason code when ignored (0 too-little-words, 1 not-hat, 2 too-quick, 3 manual, 4 old-version, 5 aborted, 6 format-error).
num_players	int	Distinct players in the game.
players	list[string]	["Player 0", …, "Player {n-1}"].
num_words	int	Distinct words used.
words	list[string]	Distinct words used, first-seen order.
num_attempts	int	Number of explanation attempts.
attempts	list[struct]	Ordered explanation attempts (see below).

Each attempts[i] is:

field	type	description
word	string	The word being explained.
explainer	int	Index of the explaining player.
guesser	int	Index of the guessing player.
explanation_time_ms	int	Time spent explaining this word, in milliseconds (base time plus any added extra time).
out_of_range	bool	True when the duration is outside [0.5 s, 5 min]; the game discards these (paused timer / clock glitch). Filter on this to match in-game scoring.
outcome	string / null	guessed, failed, timed-out, or null (moved on without a verdict).

Dataset statistics

• Games: 42475 · total explanation attempts: 1912373
• Games flagged ignored: 12321
• Players per game: {2: 25299, 3: 5343, 4: 5628, 5: 2496, 6: 1920, 7: 737, 8: 601, 9: 162, 10: 178, 11: 34, 12: 33, 13: 15, 14: 15, 15: 2, 16: 11, 17: 1}
• Attempt outcomes: {'null': 62687, 'failed': 27677, 'guessed': 1412204, 'timed-out': 409805}

About the game

The Hat (Шляпа) is a team word-guessing game: players take turns explaining words to a partner under a time limit, scoring for each word guessed in time. More at the-hat.appspot.com.

These statistics were gathered from games that players uploaded to the server at the-hat.appspot.com.