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Shrdlu is a game of finding a five- or six-letter word that fits into a set of randomly-dealt constraints. It's a print-and-play deck of fifteen cards.
Shuffle the deck and deal out a row of five cards. (If one of those cards has the "deal out a sixth card" instruction, deal out a sixth card.)
Players then race to think of a word where each letter obeys the constraint on the card in the corresponding position, with asterisks allowing any letter.
This requires a word that starts with E, T, A, O, I or N; whose third letter only appears once; and whose fifth letter is alphabetically later than its fourth. The second and fourth letters can be any letter, and the word must have five letters in all.
A valid answer would be NIGHT.
The first player to call out a valid word wins the round.
The winner of a round takes the leftmost card of the row and keeps it face-down in front of them for scoring. Take the other cards of the row and put them onto the bottom of the deck.
If nobody can think of a word that fits the dealt cards, players can agree as a group to shuffle the row back into the deck and re-deal.
After eleven rounds (when there are no longer enough cards to deal out another round), the game ends and the player who took the most face-down cards wins. If tied, the tied players reshuffle the deck and play a final tiebreaker round.
Bearing in mind the interchangeable asterisks and the possibility of dealing a sixth card, and the unusual final round possibility of "deal a sixth" plus four asterisks, there are (if I've got this right) 306,201 distinct card spreads possible in the game of Shrdlu.
Of these, only 279 have no dictionary solution (at least according to the Collins Scrabble dictionary), meaning that 99.9% of card deals have at least one possible answer. Although some of those answers may be obscure dictionary words that nobody at the table will actually know.
You can use the Shrdlu Card Server to try the game out, or to play the game around a single phone screen if you don't have a deck printed out.
You can play the game remotely on playingcards.io by importing the shrdlu.pcio game file into a room. Players should take cards into their hands when they win a round, and must hit the "Deal a 6th card" button manually if the "deal out a sixth" card appears in the spread.
This is today's random spread of cards. The 0.1% of deals with no dictionary-recognised answer are skipped, so it has at least one solution.