A word appears, you buzz in, and you have to sing a real song containing it. Then the people you are playing against decide whether you got away with it.
The rules fit in a paragraph. Each round shows one word. The first player to buzz in gets the attempt, and has to sing an actual song whose lyrics contain that word — variants count, so on rock you may reach for rocking, rocked, rocks or rocker. Your opponents then vote on whether to award the point. If they decline, the buzzer reopens and someone else can try. A tie in the voting goes to the singer. First to five points wins. You host by clicking Create Room and sending a link or a room code, and two players is enough to start.
What makes it worth the click is a piece of restraint: the game plays no audio whatsoever. There is no backing track, no lyric display, no microphone permission prompt. The developer confirmed as much when a commenter asked how the lyric highlighting stays in sync across devices — there is no highlighting, because there are no lyrics in the software. You sing out loud, either at the same table or over whatever call you were already on, and the browser’s entire job is to hold the word, the buzzer, the votes and the score. Handing the adjudication to the other players rather than to a lyrics database is the design decision the whole thing rests on: no engine has to decide whether your half-remembered chorus was really a song, because four friends already have an opinion.
The honest note is one the maker accepted himself. On the Show HN thread a commenter argued that calling it karaoke oversells it — the entire game is a one-word prompt, so singing game is the more accurate label — and the developer’s reply was simply “that’s fair.” He also flags that the buzz-in is latency-sensitive, while noting it usually takes a few seconds to think of a song anyway, which takes most of the sting out.
Free, in the browser, two to eight players, nothing to install. It is the online version of the party game Grab the Mic, and it sits alongside a companion game, Finish the Lyrics, on the same site.