Apple / games / HEADS UP!
REVIEW
Heads Up! still wins the room a decade in.
Ellen DeGeneres's forehead-charades app outlived its talk-show host because the format does the work — pass the phone, tilt to score, laugh.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Heads Up! launched on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show in 2013, sat at the top of the paid charts for most of that year, and has been a fixture at dinner parties ever since. The talk show ended in 2022. The app didn’t. Warner Bros — which absorbed it after Telltale Games folded — keeps the lights on, ships the occasional new deck, and otherwise lets the format carry the weight.
That format is hard to beat. Phone to the forehead, screen out, sixty seconds, tilt down for right and up for skip. The mechanic is so legible that a six-year-old can play it without a tutorial and a table of adults can run a tournament without a rulebook. The phone-to-the-forehead bit is the entire mechanic, and a decade hasn’t dulled it.
What’s faded is the wrapping. Ellen’s face is still on the icon, her voice still narrates parts of the onboarding, and the celebrity-host framing belongs to a different cultural moment. The app survives that anyway, because once the timer starts nobody is looking at the chrome — they’re looking at whoever’s holding the phone, shouting “tilt down, tilt down, tilt DOWN.”
The phone-to-the-forehead bit is the entire mechanic, and a decade hasn't dulled it.
FEATURES
One player holds an iPhone to their forehead, screen facing the room. A card from the chosen deck shows on the screen — a celebrity, an accent, a song to hum, a movie to act out. The room shouts clues. Tilt the phone down to mark a correct guess, tilt up to pass. A 60-second timer counts off, the front camera records the whole round, and the highlight reel plays back as a sharable video at the end.
The deck library is the long tail. The free starter pack covers Celebrities, Animals, and Acting Out; everything else — Movies, Music, Sports, Harry Potter, Disney, kid-safe packs, accents, blockbusters by decade — is a paid pack at a few dollars each, or all-you-can-play through the Heads Up! subscription. Cards are short text prompts; some packs add an audio mode where the phone reads the prompt aloud and the holder has to guess the sound.
iOS-only features have crept in over the years: ReplayKit-based video capture, Live Activity timer on the lock screen, AirPlay to a TV so the room can see the card on a bigger screen, haptic feedback on tilt. There's no Apple Watch app, no iPad-specific layout beyond stretched-iPhone, and no online multiplayer — the whole game assumes everyone is in the same room.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The format is the win. Charades-with-a-phone is a better version of charades because the prompt arrives instantly, the timer is honest, and the highlight video gives the round a second life on the group chat. Warner Bros' team that inherited the app from Telltale kept the loop tight — open, pick a deck, play in under fifteen seconds.
Pricing is fair for a party game that gets pulled out a few times a year. The free decks are enough to test-drive at a dinner; individual packs are cheap enough to buy on impulse when someone in the room asks for the Disney deck. The subscription only makes sense if you're playing weekly, which most people aren't, and the app doesn't push it hard.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The Ellen-of-it-all hasn't aged well. Her face is still on the icon, the menu chrome, and the in-app tutorial; her voice cues some of the legacy decks. After the 2022 talk-show wind-down and the workplace coverage that preceded it, the branding reads as a time capsule rather than an endorsement. Warner Bros has had years to reskin and hasn't, which is a choice.
The app also still leans on in-app purchase friction that feels older than it is. Restoring purchases across devices is fiddly, deck downloads stall on weak Wi-Fi without a clear retry, and the highlight video export occasionally fails silently on long rounds. None of it kills the night, but for a category leader at a $4.99-a-pack price point, the polish should be tighter.
CONCLUSION
Heads Up! is still the party-game default on iPhone for a reason — the format is good, the decks cover most rooms, and a round takes a minute. If you can ignore the host branding, install it before your next dinner. If you want a celebrity-free alternative, Psych! from Warner Bros' same shelf does most of the same job without the Ellen-shaped wallpaper.