A subject pours onto the plate one word at a time, rarest first. The common words — the ones that give it away — arrive last. Name it before the ink dries.
Every word in every cloud is counted from a real text. Nothing is invented and nothing is padded: if a word appears eleven times in the source, it is set at the size eleven earns. The silhouettes are drawn to hold type, which is a different craft from drawing a picture — a shape that reads beautifully at a glance may have no room inside it for a word.
Each minute carries one whisper, an epigraph offered free for the whole sixty seconds. Wrong guesses cost five.
Word pools for The Miscellany are distilled from Wikipedia article text, CC BY-SA 4.0. Classic editions draw on public-domain texts. Game design, code, prose and silhouettes are original works, © MMXXVI Macguffin Co.