The story
See charade. As a game, originally a clipped form of acting charades or, without talking, dumb charades but now usually understood as a plurale tantum.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
charades
Today it means: A game in which each player acts out a word or phrase, usually based on puns of each syllable and without speaking, for the others to guess. Full definition →