How to play Daydream

Some of them, and not all of them

One person is the storyteller. They look at their six pictures, choose one, and write a short line about it — a few words, never a description. Everybody else then quietly plays a picture from their own hand that could plausibly have earned the same line, the cards are shuffled together, and the room votes on which one was the storyteller's.

The storyteller scores only when some of the room finds their card and some of it does not. Say too much and everybody finds it and they score nothing; say something only they could decode and nobody finds it and they score nothing. Both of those failures pay everybody else at the table, so the pressure runs in two directions at once and the target is genuinely narrow. That single rule is the whole design, and everything else on this page is arithmetic around it.

You are playing two games at once

When you are not the storyteller you have two jobs in the same minute. You are trying to work out which of the cards on the table was theirs, and you are trying to make sure the card you played is one somebody else picks by mistake — a point for every person who names yours, up to three.

That is what makes the middle of the round matter. A card thrown in because it vaguely fits is a card nobody looks at twice; a card chosen because it fits the line better than the real one is how a person quietly out-scores the storyteller from the audience.

The pictures do not exist until they are dealt

There is nothing to download. Every picture is a handful of numbers — a palette, where the horizon sits, a few shapes standing on it, one small figure — and the browser draws it from those numbers when it arrives. The same numbers make the same picture on every screen in the room and in the same room replayed a year later.

So the pile never runs out and no two tables have ever been dealt the same hand. None of the pictures is a thing you could name in one word either, which is not a limitation: a card that is obviously one object makes the best line the name of that object, and the round would score itself.

One turn each, and nothing is played for you

Everybody who was at the table when it was dealt writes exactly one line, in a rotation fixed at the start, so a sitting is one lap and everybody has the hard seat once. Nobody is knocked out and nobody sits a round out.

If the storyteller says nothing before their clock runs down, the round simply does not happen — the software will not choose a picture and write a sentence on somebody's behalf. If you do not play a card in time, yours is not on the table and you have nothing to catch votes with. The only thing that is ever filled in for a silent seat is a shrug in the vote, and only because a shrug is already one of the buttons on the screen.

Questions people ask

Do I have to be able to draw?

No, and there is nothing to draw. The pictures are dealt to you already made — the game generates them, so every hand is new and nobody at the table has ever seen the cards before. What you do is choose one and write about it.

What makes a good line?

Something true about your picture that would also be true about somebody else's. "The last house before the water" is a good line; naming the thing in the middle of your card is not, and neither is an inside joke only one person could follow. The scoring is unusually direct about this — you are paid for landing between the two, and paid nothing for either extreme, so the game teaches you the range in about two rounds.

Can we play with three?

Yes, and it holds up. Three is the real floor rather than a cautious one: a round needs a storyteller and at least two cards to choose between, and with two people the vote would be "which of these is not mine". At three the bluffing gets sharper because there is only one other card to hide behind.

Is there anything to read out or set up?

No. Everyone opens the room, presses one button, and six pictures appear on their own screen that nobody else can see. There is no deck to choose, no category, no difficulty, and nothing to explain beyond the one sentence about scoring — which the game says on screen the first time it matters.

Can we play against the computer?

No, and this one is not getting a machine to play against. A stand-in would have to look at six pictures and decide which of them a sentence was written about, and that is not a part of the game — it is the game.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Daydream?

No. It runs in the browser everyone already has open. One person opens a room, reads out the six-character code or pastes the link into the channel, and everyone else is at the table in a couple of seconds.

Do we need accounts?

No. There is no sign-up, no password and no email address anywhere in the flow. You pick a name when you sit down, and that is the whole of it.

How many people can play Daydream?

3 to 8 — best with five or six. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Daydream take?

About 15 minutes, which is the length of a coffee break rather than the length of a games night. Nobody is the host in the sense of holding the controls, so a round finishes whether or not everyone is still looking at it.

Does it work over a video call?

That is what it is for. The game is on the screen and the talking is on the call — nobody has to describe a board to anybody, and the parts that must stay private stay on the server rather than being read out.