Would you rather

The discussion starter that needs no preparation

A good would you rather has no right answer and a real cost on both sides. That is why it works at the front of a classroom: everybody in the room can answer it, nobody can be wrong, and the interesting part is never the count but the argument that starts thirty seconds after it. Put one on the board at the start of a lesson and the quiet half of the room has an opinion before they have noticed they are speaking.

The split is drawn as a bar and written underneath in words, so the result is readable from the back of a room and does not depend on telling two colours apart. Keep the result and it joins a short list under the stage, which is the record of the session you want when somebody asks what the class said about the last one.

Counting hands, or passing the phone

Two ways to vote, and they suit different rooms. Counting hands is two numbers typed in by whoever is running it, and it scales to any size of group. Passing the device round is the one to use when the honest answer and the popular answer are not the same: each person chooses on their own, the screen clears before it reaches the next pair of hands, and the room only ever sees the total.

Passing works on the one device in front of you, with no rooms and no codes, in the same way the secret role cards go round. The names come from the shared list, so a group that has already typed them into never have I ever or the turn order cards does not type them twice.

Writing pairs that are worth arguing about

Three rules get you most of the way. Make both sides genuinely attractive, or genuinely awful, but never one of each: a pair where one option is obviously better is a question nobody discusses. Keep them short enough to hold in your head, because a pair that takes twenty seconds to read has lost the room. And keep them about the people answering rather than about anybody who is not there.

Type your own one per line, as A or B. The line is cut at the last instance of the word or, so an option may contain one itself and still come out in one piece. They stay in this browser, they replace the ready-made set entirely while they are switched on, and they are never put into a link, which is the rule every tool on this site follows.

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.

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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.

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