It's a little game where a hangman is slowly built (sometimes visually) as you try and guess the letters in a word. Each player starts out with 12 "lives", or guesses. A word is initially displayed to the user like:
---------
with each dash representing a single letter in the word. The user guesses letter 'b', which happens to be in the word, so no life is lost (he still has 12 left), and the word is redisplayed as:
--b------
Now, the user guesses 'e', which is not in the word. He looses a life, now he has only 11 guesses left. Then he chooses an 'a', and that's a hit, so he remains at 11 lives and the word is redisplayed as:
a-ba-----
So he continues to guess until he either types "albatross" or enters
the final
single letter guess that completes the word or looses all 12 of his
lives with
wrong guesses, at which point he looses.