Whispers

The spoken game, refereed

The game itself needs nothing but a line of people. What it does need, every single time, is somebody to remember whose turn it is, to stop the second person repeating it four times, and to know what the phrase was at the start. That is all this page does. It names the pair, counts the pass and keeps the original out of sight until the end.

Nothing is typed and nothing is heard by the device. The phrase goes to the first person only, on screen, and after that the game happens entirely in the room. If you want the version where each person types what they remember, that is the telephone game next door, and it keeps a record of every step so you can see exactly where the sentence turned.

Language lessons, and why the phrases are awkward

This is a listening exercise before it is a game, which is why it earns its place in a language classroom. A whispered sentence strips out every clue except the sounds, so the words that survive to the end of the line are the ones that have actually been learnt rather than guessed from context. Run it twice with the same line and a different phrase and the class will hear which sounds it is losing.

The two sets are chosen for that. The tongue twisters pile up the same consonant so that one slip changes everything, and the silly sentences are ordinary words in an order nobody expects, which defeats the ear's habit of filling in what it assumes comes next. Both are written to be said out loud once, quietly, by a nine year old.

Running a round that stays fair

Three rules, said before you start, are worth more than any referee. Once only, quietly enough that the third person cannot hear it, and nobody may ask for a repeat. The countdown exists to make the first two easy to keep: ten seconds is one sentence said once, and it runs out before a second go is possible.

Rounds rotate who starts, so the person at the end of one line begins the next and nobody is stuck saying it out loud twice in a row. The names come from the same shared list as every tool here with players, and the order in that list is the order the whisper travels, so a group sitting in a circle should type themselves in the order they are sitting. The screen holds itself awake while a round is running, because a phone that sleeps halfway down the line loses the count.

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.whispers.rules and pph.whispers.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.