Well, a friend on a IRC channel I frequent has actually been working on something rather interesting, he's been working on a implementation of Lingo as an IRC game. While he couldn't implement a working Lingo card system, he replaced it with a Russian Roulette-style system (where 1 of the 6 spaces on a virtual die is a stopper, number of safe spaces decreases on each turn) for now. Even worse, his dictionary that he's using is full of words I don't even think the average contestant could get in 5 tries, like "guffs", "prahu", and "tapas"!
In case you think I'm kidding (color-enhanced, the colors were actually there in a way in the client too)
<Frax2> !ready
<Lingo> Frax2, your word starts with M.
<Lingo> [color=\"#8B0000\"][M][/color] . . . .
<Frax2> mario
<Lingo> [color=\"#8B0000\"][M][/color] . . . . - mno's turn.
<mno> mulch
<Lingo> [M][L][C] . - Frax2's turn.
<Fraxtil> ?!?!?!?!
<mno> !!!
<Frax2> and how is that anything but an h?
<mno> mulce?
<Frax2> mulce
<Lingo> [color=\"#8B0000\"][M][L][C][/color] . - mno's turn.
<mno> mulca
<Lingo> [color=\"#8B0000\"][M][L][C][/color] . - Frax2's turn.
<Frax2> mulco
<Lingo> [color=\"#8B0000\"][M][L][C][/color] . - mno's turn.
<mno> mulcs
<Lingo> [color=\"#8B0000\"][M][L][C][/color] . - Frax2's turn.
<Frax2> mulci
<Lingo> [color=\"#8B0000\"][M][L][C][/color] . - mno's turn.
<mno> the christ is this word
<mno> mulcy
<Lingo> [color=\"#8B0000\"][M][L][C][/color] .
<Lingo> Sorry, team blue, but you've used all your guesses up! The word was Mulct.
<Lingo> Fraxtil of team red, it's your turn, so say '!ready' when you're ready.
And right now as I type, things are erupting into chaos; we made fun of GSN Live a bit, we laughed, we cried, we "had an enjoy"
But given that, what games do you think would also work good as IRC games?