How to play Live Wire

The pile, and the one number that matters

Everyone is dealt two cards and the rest go face down in the middle, salted with one fewer live card than there are people at the table. Every screen shows how many cards are left and how many of them are live, because that fraction is the entire game and hiding it would only mean everybody counted it on their fingers instead.

It never gets better on its own. Cards only come off the pile, so a hand that starts at four live in thirty-four is at four live in twenty by the time it has been round the table two or three times — and if two of those four have already been cut, it is two in twenty, which is a different decision. Watching that number move is what people are actually doing while somebody else takes their turn.

Four cards you play, and one that plays itself

Skip takes one draw off your turn. Look ahead shows you the next three cards off the top and shows them to nobody else. Double makes the next player draw twice — and they can answer it with two skips if they have two skips, which is usually the moment somebody discovers they have been hoarding the wrong card.

The cutter is the exception and it is never played by choice. If a live card comes off the top and you are holding one, it is spent for you, the live card leaves the game, and the hand carries on. That is deliberate: a 'do you want to use it' prompt is a question with one sane answer, and asking it would spend the best moment in the game on a dialog box.

You have to draw

Playing cards is the part of a turn you choose. Drawing is the part you owe. You can put it off — a skip is exactly that — but a turn ends by taking a card off the pile, and a seat that goes quiet has one taken for it rather than the table stopping. Nothing is being decided on your behalf there; it is the one move your turn was always going to make.

Draw a live card with no cutter in your hand and you are out of that hand. Everybody else is still standing, and that is where the hand ends.

A hand ends when somebody goes out, and then everybody is back

This is the part that is different from how these games usually run. A hand does not play down to a single survivor; it stops at the first casualty. The table gets a few seconds to look at what came out, a standings screen it can skip, and then the next hand is dealt with everybody in it and every point anybody has banked still on the board.

So going out is a hand, not an evening. Five hands make a sitting, and somebody who was unlucky in the first one is still in the running at the fifth — which is what makes taking one more card early a real choice rather than a way to end your own break.

Questions people ask

Is it just luck?

The draw is. What you do about it is not. Every turn you know exactly what the odds are, and you have between nought and five cards that change them — a skip that costs you a point of nerve, a look ahead that turns a guess into a fact for three cards, a double that moves the problem to the person on your left. The people who do well are the ones who spend those at the right moment rather than the ones who are lucky, and over five hands that shows.

If I go out, do I sit and watch?

For about fifteen seconds. The hand ends when the first person goes out rather than carrying on down to a last survivor, so there is nothing left to watch — you get the beat where everyone sees what came out, a standings screen, and then you are dealt back in with your score. It is the reason this is on a shelf that otherwise avoids knocking anybody out.

Can two of us play it?

Yes, and it is a different game. Two people share a pile with a single live card in it and two cutters somewhere in the deck, so a fair number of hands end with nobody going out at all — the pile simply runs dry and you both bank whatever nerve you showed. At five the pile is nearly twice as dense with live cards and there are more draws in a lap, so the dry hand all but disappears and somebody nearly always goes.

Can I see what anybody else is holding?

You can see how many cards they have and everything that has been played face up, and nothing else. The order of the pile and the contents of a hand are the only two secrets in the game, and a look ahead is the only way to buy any of the first one — for three cards, for yourself, and it wears off as those cards are taken.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Live Wire?

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 Live Wire?

2 to 8 — best with five. A room seats up to 12.

How long does a game of Live Wire take?

About 10 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.