Welcome to Grumbly Games!
This site is meant to help you learn English grammar by playing games. Right now, there's only one game, "details", but there might be more in the future. In details, you make a long sentence by adding details to a shorter sentence, then share it with your friends or your teacher or study group. Try it, it's fun!
Although details is meant for students and people who like word games, many of the articles on this site are meant for English teachers. They're mostly on odd grammar points or suggest fun activities for a class. Use them or share them, they're free.
How to get details
Good news, you don't have to get anything, you can play details right here, just click the button at the top of the screen. But there is an app version, and it's better. So if you want to play on a mobile device, get the app.
How to play details
details is easy! When you start a game, you get a new sentence and five cards. Each card corresponds to one of the eight types of words in English (nouns, verbs, etc.). To play, think of words or phrases that you could add to the sentence by using one or more of your cards. Every time you add words to the sentence you get one more card. If you use all your cards, you win!
Here's a short video that shows how to play details (web version).
The rules of details
details doesn't really have a lot of rules, you can play it however you want. But there are some facts you should know to make your game more fun.
- You can't change anything that's already written.
- You get articles for free. This means if you want to add a noun, "vinegar" for example, you can write the vinegar or a vinegar on the noun card, and the game will automatically separate it into the vinegar.
- You can also add articles to adjective, adverb and verb cards. Although these words don't need articles, when you want to add a noun and an adjective at the same time the adjective goes between the noun and the article. To add "the red wolf" to a sentence, write the red on the adjective card and wolf on the noun card to get the red wolf. In the same way, you might want to write the howling wolf or the very angry wolf.
- You get the adverb "not" for free. This means if you want to use the negative form of a verb you can, you don't need a separate adverb card. So to write "is not" , you just write is not on the verb card, and the game will automatically separate it into is not.
- You are responsible for punctuation. If you want to add another noun between aliens and ninjas, you have to put the comma on the noun card before you place it in the sentence. Thus, adding , vampires to your sentence gives you aliens, vampires and ninjas
- details doesn't check spelling or grammar. Just like in life, you are responsible for your own mistakes.
- There are two goals when playing details: use up all your word cards and make a cool and grammatically correct sentence.
- You can add new sentences before or after the original sentence.
- Every time you add to the sentence, you get a new word card, but if you use all your cards you win!