Build a Hangman Game (Python)

You know Hangman. A hidden word shows up as a row of blanks. You guess a letter. Right guesses fill in the blanks; wrong ones cost you a life. Run out of lives and you lose. Fill in the word and you win.

It's a small game, but it touches a lot of the things you'll use forever in Python: strings, sets, loops, conditionals, and a couple of functions that each do one clear job. By the end you'll have built the whole thing, piece by piece, and watched each piece run.

What you'll build

A complete, playable round of Hangman: a secret word shown as blanks, a record of which letters have been guessed, a life counter that drops on every miss, and the two endings - you won, or you're out of lives.

The stack

Python's standard library. Nothing to install. We use random for picking a word and that's the only import in the whole project.

This one runs in your browser

Every code block on these pages has a Run button. Click it and the code runs right here - no setup, no terminal. Because there's no console to type into, we don't use input(). Instead we feed the game a hardcoded list of guesses and print the play-by-play, so you watch a full round unfold each time you run it.

In the last phase we'll also show you how to bolt on a real input() version so you can play it for real on your own machine.

Rough time

About 45 minutes if you read along and run each block. Less if you're quick.

What you'll learn

The plan

flowchart LR
  A[Phase 1<br/>word as blanks] --> B[Phase 2<br/>handle a guess]
  B --> C[Phase 3<br/>lives and endings]
  C --> D[Phase 4<br/>word list and loop]

Each phase ends with a working piece you can run. By Phase 4 those pieces snap together into the finished game. Let's pick a word.