English duels

The English duels are two-player games, mostly card games, for pupils who are beginning in English. There are nine. Go Fish! is an English version of the game of families where you look for pairs, Happy Families is a more strategic improvement on it, and Who is it? is a guessing game. Six others joined them in November 2026, each on one point of the language: Last Letter chains words by their last letter, Robot Tug has you read movement orders, Big Red Cat has you put adjectives before the noun, Market Day has you choose between singular and plural, True or Liar? has you announce a card laid face down, true or not, and Describe and Rebuild has you describe a scene with words of place. The instructions are in French, every line of English is recorded, and the game refuses wrong answers. The first three have been played in class.

In Go Fish!, you look for pairs among illustrated countable nouns, and each word is spoken by a recorded voice. In Happy Families, a family is a picture and its four members vary along a single axis: first numbers (one cat, four cats), then colours. You build your question with the member and the family, and you can name in one go all the missing cards of a family. In Who is it?, each player hides a picture on a shared board and asks questions taken from a row of visible cards. Answers are short (“Yes, it is”), and the game checks them. The following six keep this form and hide their strategy in what you leave to the other. In Robot Tug, the two players command the same robot with cards written without arrows, and a careless card gives the round to the other. In Describe and Rebuild, each describes their hidden scene while the other rebuilds it, and fewer sentences earn more, provided you say everything.

Each duel is played on two screens, against the computer or on a shared screen. The voice is Pocket TTS, a neural synthesis, slightly slowed. I set aside a first voice, judged too robotic, and I check each recording with speech recognition software, because it is isolated words that make a voice fail.

Go Fish! did not stand up as a game. Simulating it, perfect memory beat a player who clicks at random by only a little, and I understood it was an exercise more than a game. I was looking for duels where you win by thinking, not by drawing the right card. So every rule goes through a simulator before it is shown: a shrewd player must clearly beat a random one.

The starting need was simple: a small local network game to learn English, requiring no level. In the room, it runs on that network, with no teacher mode, and each workstation launches it from its home screen. I did not want a voice that sounds false either.