Alright, let's build something tangible. We're making a Hangman game. I've got the basics of loops and lists down from previous lessons, but putting them together into a game loop is where things usually get messy. I'll build this out loud with you, and we'll fix the bugs as they pop up.

Masking the Secret Word

First, I need a word. I'll keep it simple and just hardcode one for now—let's go with "pythonic". The challenge is that I can't just show the word to the player. I need to show underscores for letters they haven't guessed yet. My first instinct is to create a list of underscores.

word = "pythonic"
guesses = []
display = ["_"] * len(word)
print(display) # Output: ['_', '_', '_', '_', '_', '_', '_', '_']

That looks right, but printing a Python list looks ugly with the brackets and commas. I want it to look like _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _. I'll use "".join(), but I'll add a space for readability.

print(" ".join(display)) # Output: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The Logic Gap

Now I need to let the user guess a letter. I'll wrap this in a while loop so the game keeps going until they win or run out of turns. Let's try a basic version where we just check if the letter is in the word.

word = "pythonic"
guesses = []
lives = 6

while lives > 0:
    guess = input("Guess a letter: ").lower()
    
    if guess in word:
        print("Correct!")
    else:
        print("Wrong!")
        lives -= 1

Wait, I just realized something. I'm telling them if they're correct, but I'm not actually updating those underscores. The game is basically useless right now because the "board" never changes. I need to loop through the original word and, if the character matches the guess, update the display list at that exact index.

# Inside the 'if guess in word:' block:
for index in range(len(word)):
    if word[index] == guess:
        display[index] = guess

Handling the "Double Guess" Frustration

I just ran this and noticed a annoying bug: if I guess 'p' twice, the game tells me "Correct!" both times, but it doesn't actually progress anything. Even worse, if I guess a wrong letter twice, I lose two lives for the same mistake. That's poor UX.

I should check if the letter is already in my guesses list before I do anything else. If it is, I'll just tell the user they've already tried that one and skip the rest of the loop using continue.

if guess in guesses:
    print("You already guessed that!")
    continue
guesses.append(guess)

Defining the Finish Line

Last piece of the puzzle: how does the game end? Right now, the loop only stops when lives hits 0. But what if they guess the word perfectly? They'd be stuck in the loop forever unless I manually crash the program.

I have two options: I could track how many letters are left to guess, or I can simply check if there are any underscores left in the display list. Checking for underscores is cleaner. If "_" not in display, they've won.

Here is how the final logic flows together:

word = "pythonic"
display = ["_"] * len(word)
guesses = []
lives = 6

while lives > 0 and "_" in display:
    print(f"\nWord: {' '.join(display)} | Lives: {lives}")
    guess = input("Guess a letter: ").lower()

    if len(guess) != 1 or not guess.isalpha():
        print("Please enter a single letter.")
        continue

    if guess in guesses:
        print("Already guessed that!")
        continue

    guesses.append(guess)

    if guess in word:
        for i in range(len(word)):
            if word[i] == guess:
                display[i] = guess
    else:
        lives -= 1
        print("Wrong!")

if "_" not in display:
    print(f"\nCongrats! You found the word: {word}")
else:
    print(f"\nGame over! The word was: {word}")

I added a small check for isalpha() and length because users love to press Enter without typing anything or type "123" just to see if the program crashes. Always assume the user will try to break your input.

📋 Practical Task

Adding a Word Bank to Hangman

Currently, the game uses a single hardcoded word ("pythonic"). To make this a real game, you need to randomize the word each time it starts.

• Import the random module at the top of your script.
• Create a list called word_bank containing at least five different words.
• Replace the word = "pythonic" line with a call to random.choice() to pick a random word from your list.
• Run the game multiple times to ensure the display list and the win/loss logic adapt correctly to words of different lengths.