Emoji Games: Scavenger Hunts, Quizzes and Party Ideas

Emoji work well in games because everyone already knows them and nobody reads them exactly the same way. A row like 🦁👑 is easy. 🚢🧊💔 takes a second. That small gap between seeing and getting it is the whole fun.

This guide covers the games you can play online, the ones you can run yourself at a party or in a classroom, and how to write emoji puzzles that are hard but fair. If you just want to play now, try the games on our games page.

This is the one most people mean when they search "emoji scavenger hunt." Google Brand Studio built it in 2018 as a browser experiment. The game shows you an emoji, and you have a few seconds to find that object in real life and point your phone camera at it, according to Google's own announcement. Lowyat.NET put the timer at 20 seconds per item when Google promoted it for World Emoji Day that year.

The clever part is under the hood. A neural network runs in your browser through TensorFlow.js and guesses what the camera sees. The TensorFlow team's write-up explains that they took an existing image model (MobileNet) and retrained its last layer on about 400 objects, using 100 to 1,000 photos for each. The code was released as open source.

The original link now redirects to Google's archive site, and the GitHub repository was archived (made read-only) in May 2026. The archived page still shows the game, but expect it to work best, if at all, on a recent phone browser.

It's a good example of a game that only works because emoji are a shared visual vocabulary. The game says 👟, you hunt for a shoe. No translation needed.

Apple launched its own daily puzzle on World Emoji Day, July 17, 2025, for Apple News+ subscribers. TheStreet describes it as a Wordle-style game: you drag emoji into blanks to complete a phrase, then share your score. Domus gives the example of a 🍐 pear completing the word "disappear" and lists the US, Canada, the UK and Australia as launch countries.

Google's Emoji Kitchen is not a game in the scoring sense, but plenty of people play with it like one. You pick two emoji and get a mashup sticker. Since July 2024 it also runs in Google Search: search "emoji kitchen" and tap "Get cooking," per Google's World Emoji Day post. We explain it in more detail in our Emoji Kitchen guide.

Casual "guess the emoji" games are everywhere on game portals. Italian players searching "giochi emoji" will mostly land on this type. Poki's Guess the Emojis, for example, asks you to match emoji to reveal a hidden word, film or phrase.

You don't need an app for most emoji games. A group chat or a whiteboard is enough.

This is the classic. The host shows one puzzle at a time, collects answers and reveals them at the end. Gloww's team-building guide suggests grouping puzzles by genre and offering multiple choice if your group is new to it. Printable versions such as Twinkl's Emoji Pictionary do the same for films and books. To practise solo, our Emoji Rebus game has you decode movie and song titles from emoji.

A few to start with:

You can copy Google's idea without a phone camera. Print or send a list of 10–15 emoji, set a timer, and have players photograph or collect the real object. Mix easy finds (key 🔑, spoon 🥄) with harder ones (potted plant 🪴, magnet 🧲). Outdoors, use nature emoji: 🍂 🐜 🪶 🍄. Pick a fixed set and copy them straight from our full emoji list so everyone sees the same symbols.

In emoji charades, one player gets a secret word and may only answer questions with emoji. It forces creative reading: 🔥🏠 could be "fire station," "housewarming" or "burning down the house." Story chains run the other way. Each person adds one emoji, and at the end someone has to tell the story out loud.

Teachers have used emoji games for reading and language practice for years. In an Edutopia piece, teacher Marissa King describes using emoji to teach context clues: students compare how one emoji changes meaning in different sentences, then write their own decoding steps. Dictionary.com's guide for educators suggests rebus stories, stories built from three random emoji, and emoji plot summaries, such as 🐛🍃💤🦋 for The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

There is some research behind this too. A 2025 systematic review of 22 studies on emoji in kindergarten English learning reported benefits for vocabulary, recognising emotions and working together. It looked at emoji use in general, not games specifically, so treat it as supporting evidence rather than proof.

Most bad emoji puzzles fail in one of three ways: too literal, too obscure, or dependent on how one platform draws an emoji. Some tips:

World Emoji Day falls on July 17 every year. Timeanddate.com says Jeremy Burge started it in 2014 and chose the date because it was shown on Apple's calendar 📅 emoji. Both Google's scavenger hunt promotion and Apple's Emoji Game launch were timed to it, so it's a natural date for a quiz night or an emoji-only chat challenge.