Undercover Word Game

How to play

1. Add everyone in the room: Type the names one by one — anywhere from 4 to 16 people. Duplicate names get numbered automatically. In a hurry? Tap 'Quick start with 6' and you're two clicks from dealing.
2. Confirm the role split and deal: The game recommends how many undercovers to hide for your headcount (one for six players, for example) — take it and hit 'Deal the words'. Want more bite? Open 'Adjust' for extra undercovers, up to two blanks, three difficulty sets, clue and debate timers, and the no-vote first round. Illegal splits are refused on the spot with the reason.
3. Pass the phone, then describe and vote: The screen names who gets the phone next. Hold the card down to see your word; let go and it covers instantly. Once everyone has looked, take turns giving a one-sentence clue, debate, then pass the phone again for a secret vote. At the count the ballots land one by one and every vote is revealed, then the top-voted player's card flips over.

Rules & variants

Three roles sit at the table. Most people are civilians holding the same word. A small minority are undercovers holding a different word that sounds a lot like it. An optional blank holds no word at all. Nobody is told which side they are on — you might be looking at 'latte' while everyone else reads 'cappuccino'. That is the trap first-timers fall into: holding a word does not make you a civilian.

How many players you need: four minimum, sixteen maximum, six to ten is the sweet spot. Once the headcount is set the game recommends one undercover for 4-6 players, two for 7-10, three for 11-14 and four for 15-16, and you can override it. The hard rule is that infiltrators must start strictly outnumbered by civilians; anything else is refused with an explanation. When civilians lead by exactly one you get a yellow warning but the round still starts. Three players or fewer is refused outright — one elimination leaves two people and the win condition fires immediately.

Every round runs the same four steps: clues, debate, vote, count. During clues the screen shows whose turn it is in the largest type on the page; tap 'Done' and it advances. The base speaking order is shuffled once at the deal and the opener rotates every round, and the opener has nothing to do with anyone's role — so the awkward job of speaking first with zero information never lands on the same person twice. The debate runs 60 seconds by default; when it hits zero the ring turns red to nudge you, but nothing advances and nobody is eliminated.

Three rules stay pinned to the clue screen: never say any part of the word, never lie, and never repeat someone else's clue word for word. The game deliberately does not police these — a phone cannot hear what you said, so the table settles it. We don't pretend to referee something we can't hear.

Voting passes the phone by default. The screen names each voter in turn; behind your own handoff screen you get big buttons for every candidate (never yourself, never anyone already out), pick one, confirm, and the screen covers itself for the next person. During the vote the game only shows '3 / 6 voted' — never who picked whom. Big group in a hurry? Switch to the open show of hands and fill in one screen, at the cost of everyone influencing everyone.

Tied vote? No rock-paper-scissors. The tie sends you straight to a runoff: only the tied players give one more clue, then everyone still alive who is NOT in the tie votes again. The runoff never recurses — a second tie simply means nobody goes out and the round ends. If every surviving player is in the tie there is nobody left to break it, so the runoff is skipped entirely. To guarantee the game ends, two consecutive rounds without an elimination close it out as a draw, with the full truth table still revealed.

The win condition is a ratio, not a headcount: civilians win the moment zero infiltrators are left standing; the infiltrators win as soon as their number reaches or passes the number of surviving civilians. Neither, and you play another round. No elimination means no verdict — the headcount hasn't changed, so the answer can't have either. The popular 'stop at three players' rule fires immediately after the first elimination in a four-player game, which is exactly why this game doesn't use it.

Playing the blank: you get no word, so you have to reconstruct what everyone is circling and improvise a clue that fits. Your compensation is the steal — when you get voted out, you get one shot at naming the civilians' word, and getting it right wins you the entire round outright while nobody else scores. The check ignores spacing, punctuation and capitalisation and accepts the common alternative spellings recorded with each pair, but the verdict is final: no manual override, so the table never argues about whether it counted. Blanks default to zero and cap at two.

Word pairs and repeats: 270 original pairs across three sets. Everyday pairs are clearly different things from the same family, so one clue separates them. Tricky pairs need two rounds of clues. Brutal pairs diverge on a single detail. A round consumes exactly one pair, and this device remembers the last 300 and avoids them, so a whole evening rarely repeats. When a set genuinely runs dry it says so and reshuffles. You can also add your own pairs in the settings — up to 200, stored only on your device — and tick 'use only my own pairs'.

Strategy by role. Civilian: aim for a clue your side understands and the undercover cannot copy — open on a shared dimension like purpose or setting, and save the distinguishing detail for round two. Undercover: listen for two clues before committing, echo the general shape, avoid specifics, and resist the urge to sound more expert than the civilians. Blank: assemble a candidate word from what you hear and decide what you'll say on the steal before you get voted out. For everyone: treat 'that clue was suspiciously confident' as a signal — over-confidence usually comes from someone who has just realised they might be holding the other word.

House rules live in the setup panel, not on separate pages: zero to two blanks, three word sets, a 20/30/45-second clue timer or none, a 30/60/90/120-second debate timer or none, secret or open voting, a no-vote first round (round one is clues and debate only — an extra round of information for hardened groups), skip animations, and a tap-to-reveal mode for anyone who can't hold a button down. Everything is remembered on your device.

A full example: six players, one undercover, everyday set. Civilians hold 'latte', the undercover holds 'cappuccino'. Round one, six clues, sixty seconds of arguing, then the phone goes round for the vote and lands on 3 / 2 / 1 — six ballots for six living players. The top-voted player flips over as the undercover, zero infiltrators are left, and the civilians take it. The truth table then lays out all six roles, both words, who went out when and exactly who voted for whom — reliably the funniest thirty seconds of the night.

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