Wow, wish I had it that easy as a kid. Everybody I ever played with drew in the gallows to begin with, so you just had 6 misses (2x leg, 2x arm, body, head) before you lost.
Yeah, what we would have given to have an arm and a leg. When I was young, our hangmen only had heads. And when you lost, your opponent cut off one of your toes.
Where I'm from, we never declared the game lost until we'd gone through the entire alphabet. Once you drew the whole guy, you had to get creative: add tentacles, a hat, a giant turtle that the gallows is sitting on, one or more flying saucers, and so forth.
my favourite hangman word is tmesis.
i'm yet to lose a game with it.
it works well psychologically: people very quickly get to t_esis (e and t being the most common letters) but m takes too long: although m is common, tmesis is the only word in the english language that starts like this.
My favorite words for stumping everybody are: lynx and eczema. I thought for sure that 'lynx' would get on that list since there is only a "sometimes" vowel and an 'x' in there.
I'm a big fan of words that use w as their only vowel, like crwth, cwm, and pwll. Pwll is especially good because even if they get P and L, most guessers will go through any common vowels they haven't yet tried, and run out of guesses before they even consider W.
I think this just means our Nash Equilibrium has shifted a bit. If the opponent knows you know this, he'll guess 'z' and 'x' more often, so you would use words that included those probabilistically so as to foil this as often as possible. He will then guess them probabilistically accordingly, and eventually Equilibrium returns.
But if you don't wanna go through all that, I'd say just go find some non-nerds to play hangman with tonight, and enjoy the knowledge while you can.
