Hidden information

A party where everybody is up to something

Give each person a small thing to pull off during the evening and an ordinary dinner turns into a game that runs underneath the conversation. Get somebody to say the word banana. Get two people to swap seats. Work a word into a sentence without anybody noticing it was planned. Nobody announces anything, and at the end you go round the table and find out who managed theirs.

The same idea carries a team day or a long family lunch, because it asks nothing of anybody except that they keep talking. The ready-made missions are written to be possible for a nine-year-old and still awkward for an adult, and you can replace the lot by typing your own, one per line.

One prompt each, without a pile of paper

A class where every child has a different question is normally a class with thirty slips of paper in it. Type the questions here instead, one per line, and hand the tablet along the row: each child sees theirs, hides it, and passes it on. Harder questions and easier ones can sit in the same list, and nobody can tell which one anybody else was given.

It does the same job for an escape room or a treasure hunt, where each player holds one piece of a clue that only means something once the group pools it. The names come from the shared roster, the same one the secret role cards and the turn order use, so a group that plays a few things types its names once. Put the countdown timer next to it if the round needs a clock.

Targets, and why nobody draws their own name

The target round gives every player somebody else to watch. Drawing names out of a hat has a famous flaw: sooner or later somebody pulls their own, and the whole thing has to start again. Here the players are arranged in a shuffled ring and each one is given the next, so everybody is watching exactly one person, everybody is being watched by exactly one person, and your own name cannot reach your own card.

However the cards were made, they stay on the device they were dealt on. The deal is kept in this browser so a locked screen does not end the game, nothing is uploaded, and the share link carries the name of a ready-made set and nothing else at all. Hold to see is the default for the same reason it is on the role cards: nothing stays on screen once a finger leaves the glass.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

It works on the one device in front of you, passed around or propped where everybody can see it. There are no rooms, no codes and no accounts, because there is no server behind this site for any of that to run through.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.hidden.cards, pph.hidden.deal and pph.hidden.reveal, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.

Player names are kept under pph.players so every tool with players reads the same list. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.