Imposter Circle
One phone goes round the table, everyone reads the same secret word, and one person gets a blank card instead. Friends of mine wanted to play that one evening, and every app we tried either put the word lists behind a paywall or ran an ad between rounds. So I built the imposter app that does neither.
The game is the conversation that comes out of it, not the app. Everyone reads their card for themselves and the phone goes round once, and that is very nearly the whole job the app has. An app for one phone that up to 24 people share is a slightly odd thing to design. Every card has to look the same from the other side of the table, because one colour in the wrong place would already say who the imposter is. Four rounds running as the imposter is nobody's idea of a good evening either, so the odds tip towards whoever has been picked least, but not so predictably that you could count it off the seating order.
Most of the work sits in the word lists you play with. A word must not be too obscure, and the decoy the imposter gets in some of the modes can sit neither too close to the real word nor too far from it. Over 1,000 words in the end, and I obviously did not write all of those pairs myself, so a good part of the job was steering the AI until what came back was worth keeping.
- Five modes, over 1,000 words in 20 categories, 3 to 24 players
- Everything playable is free
- Offline, no account, nothing leaves the phone
Interested in something similar?