How to play Straight Face

One question, and nobody has been told the answer

A question goes up on every screen at once with an answer that is true and that hardly anybody has. There is nobody running the round: no seat was dealt the answer, no seat is reading it off a card, and the television at the front does not have it either. Then seventy-five seconds to type something that could be it.

Everybody writes at the same time. If two people happen to write the same thing it becomes one line with both their names under it rather than two identical buttons the room has to choose between at random — and both of them are paid in full for everybody who fell for it. If you happen to write the real answer, you are told so and asked for another, so nobody is quietly scored for being right by accident.

The slate is unsigned while you vote

What you wrote comes back shuffled in with everybody else's and with the true one, in plain text, with nothing marking any of them. That is not decoration: a slate with names on it is not a game, because you would vote against whoever you know bluffs and for whoever you like, and the truth would never be found by looking for it.

One vote each. You cannot pick your own — it is drawn as a line rather than as a button that would be refused — and there is a control for having no idea at all, which is a move somebody made rather than a slip that never arrived. Picking lifts a line and a second press sends it, because a vote that cannot be taken back should cost two deliberate actions. Nothing shows a running tally, so the room argues on the call instead of watching a counter.

Then every line gets its author's name

The instant the last vote lands, each line goes up with whoever wrote it and whoever picked it. Not in the scoreboard afterwards, not on request: there is no state of this game in which something has been voted on and its author is unknown, and the writing box says so before it takes a keystroke.

That is the whole of the moderation policy on a shared text box here, and it is not a concession bolted on. You are paid a point for every person your answer took in, and there is no way to hand somebody that point without saying whose answer it was. There is no word filter and there will not be one — a filter is a promise we could not keep in two languages, and it does nothing about the answer that is uncomfortable because it is about somebody in the room. A name does.

Five questions, and the last one stays up

When the reveal's clock runs out the table does not get swept: the slate, the names on it and the answer stay on the screen until somebody deals the next question, because that is the part people actually talk about. Whoever opened the room deals, and holds no other control.

Somebody who joins halfway is seated straight away and dealt in on the next question rather than dropped into a round that has already been written. Somebody who closes their laptop mid-round does not hold the table: the phase ends on its clock, and a round the table walks away from scores nobody rather than scoring whoever was left.

Questions people ask

Is it a quiz? Do I have to know things?

Barely. Finding the real answer is worth two points and everything else on the sheet is paid for inventing one, so a question nobody at the table can answer is the best kind of round rather than a dud. The questions are chosen to be things an ordinary person could plausibly have written and would not actually have known — no sport, no politics, nothing anybody revised for.

Is a shared text box safe to put in front of a team?

It is here, because it is anonymous for exactly one phase and never again. Nothing is signed while the room votes, which the game needs; every author is named the second the vote closes, which the scoring forces, since you cannot be paid for taking five people in without the room being told whose answer it was. There is no word filter — that would be a promise we could not keep in two languages, and it would do nothing about the answer that is uncomfortable because it is about a person in the room.

Can we play it in Swedish?

No, and there is no Swedish deck coming. The true answer is the one thing on the slate that nobody in the room wrote, so it has to sound like everything around it — and a table typing half in one language and half in the other hands it to whoever notices which language it is in. Translating the deck does not fix that, because it is the room that is bilingual and not the pack.

Can I play it on my own?

No, and there is no stand-in chair to offer. Nothing we could build writes an answer that sounds like it came from your table, and a room voting on a plausible-sounding average is playing a different game with the best part taken out.

Does anybody have to install anything to play Straight Face?

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 Straight Face?

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

How long does a game of Straight Face 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.