Secret roles

The games this is for

A whole family of party games works the same way: everybody gets a card nobody else sees, most people get an ordinary one, and one or two get something that changes the game. The rest of the evening is spent working out who has what.

The awkward part has always been the dealing. Folded paper gets read through, a deck has to be found, and somebody ends up dealing themselves. This deals from a set you can write in ten seconds, gives every player exactly the counts you set, and never shows two people the same screen.

Running a game with one phone

Name everybody in the Players tab, choose or write your roles, and press deal. The phone then asks for one person at a time: it names them, they hold the button, they see their card, they let go, and it goes to the next person. Nothing is on screen between two players.

The names come from the shared roster, the same one the deck shuffler and the lives tracker use, so a group that plays a few things in an evening types its names once. If a round needs a clock, the countdown timer is the page to put next to it.

The honesty rule

A phone passed round a table is only as private as the table makes it. Hold the phone flat, look at your own card, and give it a second before you pass it on, because the tell is usually in how long somebody took rather than in what they saw. Hold to see is the default for exactly that reason: nothing stays on screen after a finger leaves the glass.

Nothing about the deal leaves the device. It is kept as a list of ids in this browser so a locked screen does not end the game, it is never uploaded, and the share link carries which ready-made set you used and nothing else at all.

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.roles.setup, pph.roles.deal and pph.roles.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.