Timer bomb

Why the number is hidden

A countdown everybody can read is a different game. People hold on until four seconds left and then pass, which means the last person always loses and the middle of the round is dead time. Hide the number and the whole round becomes live: every second you hold it is a decision, and passing early is a real cost rather than an obvious play.

Hiding it properly takes more care than it sounds. The fuse is drawn the moment it is lit and lives only in the page, never in storage and never in a link. The bar on screen is drawn against the longest fuse you allowed rather than the one that was drawn, which is why it can empty while the bomb is still burning. A bar that ran out exactly on time would be the number, just in a different shape.

Answer before it goes

The classroom version is not a party game at all. Light a short fuse, ask a question, and the answer has to be in before it goes. It removes the thing that makes quick-fire questions uncomfortable, which is a teacher deciding when somebody has had long enough: the bomb decides, it is not personal, and nobody can argue with it.

For that use, set a narrow range like ten to twenty seconds, turn the tell on so the room can hear the end coming, and leave the knockout off. The point is the pressure, not removing anybody from the lesson.

Knocking people out, carefully

Elimination is off by default and that is deliberate. A game that removes one player every round leaves somebody sitting out for twenty minutes, and it is almost always the same somebody. With it off, the bomb still makes the same noise and still names the holder, and everybody is in the next round.

For a version that tracks turns properly and runs a whole knockout to a winner, the hot potato is the page next door. For a countdown everybody can see, which is the right tool far more often than a hidden one, that is the countdown timer.

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.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.bomb.range, pph.bomb.tell and pph.bomb.muted, 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.