Tic Talk pits two teams against one another each round, with one team creating words and the other trying to figure out what was created. At the start of a round, one team flips its sand timer, then rolls five colored, twelve-sided letter dice; each color corresponds to a row on a paper tablet, with the red die indicating what the first letter in a word must be, the yellow die indicating the second letter in a separate word must be, and so on. The team members think up words that fit these constraints as quickly as possible, stopping the sand timer once they've finished.

Following this, a member of the other team looks at the word list, starts the same sand timer in reverse — thereby giving him as much time as the team took to write down its words — then tries to get her teammates to guess these five words. Clue-giving is done Taboo-style, and that team scores one point for each word guessed in the time allowed.