Telephone

The oldest party game, with the referee built in

Whispering down a line has one weakness: nobody can prove what was actually said. Half the argument at the end is about whether the fourth person mangled it or the fifth misheard it, and there is no way to settle it. Typing each step keeps a record of every version while the game runs, so the reveal shows exactly where the sentence turned, and the room can see which link in the chain did it.

It also removes the part nobody enjoys, which is being the person who did not hear it. Everybody gets the same few seconds with the same words in front of them in the same size. What changes after that is memory, and memory is the game.

Why nothing you type is kept

The sentences never leave the page. They are not written into your browser's storage, they are not sent to a server, because there is no server, and they are never put into a share link. Stop the game or close the tab and they are gone. That is deliberate: this is the one tool here where a group types whatever it finds funny at eleven at night, and the only safe place for that is nowhere.

The one thing the page does remember is how many seconds the message shows for, because it is a setting rather than something you wrote. The names come from the same shared list every tool with players uses, and they stay in this browser too. A share link carries the seconds and nothing else at all.

Running it with a class, or with a big group

In a classroom this is a listening and memory exercise that children will ask to repeat, and it is a good one for a language lesson because the words that survive are the ones that have been properly learnt. Three or four short rounds beat one long one, and a sentence of six to eight words is the sweet spot: long enough to lose something, short enough that the last person still has a sentence.

With more than a dozen people, split into two lines and race them, then compare the two endings. The drawing variant needs paper rather than a phone, and the whiteboard is the page for that half of it. For the spoken version, where nobody types at all and the screen only names the next pair, the whispers referee is the one to open instead. For the same group in a different mood, the charades bowl and pictionary are next door.

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.telephone.rules, 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.