One phone is the Mimer. The actor holds it, everyone else watches the actor — and the clock never stops between cards.
Teams. Two or more. Each team takes turns sending one person up to act; everybody on that team guesses.
Your turn. Build a stack of four cards off three face-down piles — safe, swing and hard — choosing how hard each card is allowed to be, not which word it is. Then turn them over: every card has two words on it worth different points, so pick a word on each and put them in whatever order you want. That is every decision you get to make with the clock stopped.
The Mimer. Hit start and the machine begins eating your cards on a fixed schedule: card 1 at 5 seconds, card 2 at 10, card 3 at 15, card 4 at 20. Those four moments never move. Get card 1 in two seconds and card 2 has eight seconds to live instead of five. Grind on card 1 until it falls and card 2 still dies at ten. The clock does not reset, it does not pause, and it is why this is not charades.
Acting. No talking, no sounds, no spelling in the air, no pointing at things in the room. Cards come in order — you cannot skip the one you hate.
Scoring. Somebody says the word, you hit GOT IT before the card drops, and the points are yours. Let it drop and they are gone. First team to the target score wins.
Guesstures is a game by Milton Bradley (now Hasbro). This is a non-commercial fan implementation of the rules; no artwork or word list from the published game is used — the deck here is written from scratch.
The settings are open. The plastic Mimer gave you four cards at five seconds and no argument. Here the per-card time, the number of cards and the target score are all yours, so a turn can be a frantic twelve seconds or a generous forty-eight.
You build your own stack. The box hands you four cards off the top of the deck. Here you choose the difficulty of each of the four, face down, and then — once both words on each are visible — which word to play and what order the cards load in. Order is not a formality: card 1 is the only one that cannot be handed time saved on the card before it, so leading with the one you can do fastest is worth real seconds.
Up to six teams rather than two, because the box's two-team rule is about the physical deck and nothing else.
Three seconds of countdown before the clock starts, with the first word already on screen — the plastic one made you look down at the moment you most needed to be looking up.
Nothing is hidden from you but the words. Points, what is left on the stack and how much time this card has are all on screen while you act.