How to Play Story Chain: Blind Writing, the Read-Aloud and the Vote

Picture a story written one sentence at a time where nobody ever sees the whole thing: the hero reaches orbit in sentence two and is queueing at the tax office by sentence five. Story Chain exists to manufacture exactly this beautiful chaos — and then have it read aloud at the table. A narrator too busy laughing to finish is the game's official success metric.

Setup: one QR, zero excuses

One person creates a table on the home page, a QR code appears, everyone scans it and types a name. No app, no account. The game plays with 3 to 10 people; the writing order is drawn at random and stays fixed for the whole game.

How it works

1. A random opening line appears — the fuse of the story.
2. On your turn you add exactly one sentence. You get 60 seconds and at most 140 characters. Run out of time and your turn is skipped; the story waits for no one. 😴
3. In blind chain mode (the default) you only see the previous sentence while writing — that's where the chaos guarantee comes from. In open story mode the whole text is visible: more coherent, less unhinged.
4. The table goes around two full cycles: everyone writes two sentences.
5. After the last sentence, the story appears on every screen with the authors attached. Now comes the ritual: one person reads the whole story aloud, start to finish. Don't rush it — the read-aloud is the finale, give it room.

How the winner is decided

When the reading ends, the vote opens: everyone picks their favorite sentence in the story. You can't vote for your own line, and your first vote is locked. The author of the most-voted sentence is crowned the pen of the night — and in party mode that ranking feeds the table score too.

Pen tactics

• End with a pass. A sentence closing on "and as the door swung open…" hands the next writer material on a silver plate; generous setups get remembered in the vote.
• Spend your 140 characters on one idea. One vivid image beats two crammed events — the lines that explode in the read-aloud are the short ones.
• In blind mode, be the context keeper. If the previous line says "the cow was still on the roof", work with the cow; a sentence that opens a brand-new topic writes itself, not the story.
• Add characters, don't kill them. Every new name that enters the story becomes a toy for the writers after you; a story that ends early scores for nobody.

The table's novel awaits

Start Story Chain and let the opening line drop. When it's over, party mode carries the same room code into the next game and points stack all night. Literary history forgives; the table never does. 📖