I happened across a new(ish) app on Google Play called Polygloss, which lets users take part in a language-based guessing game of sorts. These matches can be played with friends or with randomly-assigned partners.
The one starting the match picks an image, and provides some clues in the target language as to which image that may be. Then the partner has several options - to translate what the first person said, to offer corrections, and/or to give awards for various things (creativity and humor included). Once the partner has made their guess as to which image the first person chose, it's their turn to pick the image for the first person to guess. And on it goes
The images are organized by topic, which is nice. Paying members get immediate access to all topics (to my understanding), but non-paying members can still unlock all the lessons through earning stars.
You can add or remove languages on your profile, or adjust their levels as needed (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). You can also see what level your partner is at and vary the difficulty of your clues accordingly.
This game is centered around free response and is great for sharpening your writing skills. Even better, because everything is free response, this app works for pretty much any language - as long as you can find someone to practice with. Note, however, that this app isn't intended for beginners without any prior experience with the language - this app is purely for practice and learning through mistakes, and assumes some background with the language (enough to formulate your own clues for each image).
It also has a few other perks that I haven't gone into, but overall, the app seems nicely planned. It's very simple (no animations!) with a consistent graphics style that is far better than Duolingo's.
The only real downsides to it are: 1) unless you have friends to play with on the platform, you don't really have any control over the level of your partner. I.e. there's no way to specify you want a native speaker vs. a beginner. This means the quality of any feedback can also vary a good bit. And 2) you can get invitations for any language, not just the one you're currently practicing - which isn't much of a problem, but it can be confusing to be practicing German and suddenly opening a match that's in Welsh. A means of better splitting those up (and turning off or "snoozing" matches for certain languages) would be nice. A dark mode would be awesome too, but last I heard, that's already slated for development by the devs.
Overall, the community seems good, even for less-common languages - and I definitely recommend anyone in need of a little language practice to give it a shot. And since it doesn't seem this service has been mentioned elsewhere just yet, I figured I'd give it a shout-out for anyone else who might be interested in trying it.
(Yes, I've mentioned it once before, but there was some inaccurate info in that post and I figured this app deserved its own spotlight for a bit anyway. )
If anyone else has tried this app, what were your thoughts?