How to play
Undercover takes ten minutes to play and thirty seconds to explain. Everything below is detail — you can start a game now and come back later.
Who is who
GUITAR
You are the majority. You all share the same word, but you don't know who else has it. Your problem: say enough to recognise your own kind, without saying enough to help the impostor.
FLUTE
You have a neighbouring word, and at first you don't know it. You will work it out by listening. Then you must stay believable with the wrong word in hand.
???
You have nothing at all. No word. You must work out what the others are talking about and talk like them. Optional, from five players up.
One round, played out
Five players. Four were dealt guitar, one was dealt flute — and nobody knows which.
The vote comes in: four votes on Theo. He had flute. Each of the four civilians scores 100; Theo scores nothing.
Too vague and you look like the impostor. Too precise and you hand him the answer. That tension is the whole game.
Scoring
| +100 | You are a civilian and you pick an impostor. |
| +50 | You are an impostor, per player who did not pick you. |
| +100 | You are Mr White, unmasked, and you name the civilians' word. |
There is no winning team. Each ballot only scores for the player who cast it: you don't play for a side, you play for yourself. A tie therefore blocks nothing, and nobody is eliminated — a game is decided on a single vote, then the next one starts. Points add up across the series.
What the game forbids
- Saying your own word. The server rejects the clue, even buried in a sentence.
- Repeating a clue already given in the same round.
- Voting for yourself.
- Speaking out of turn. The order is fixed: each player passes to their right-hand neighbour, and the first speaker is drawn at random each game.
These rules are enforced by the server, not by the display. Editing the page in your browser buys you nothing.
What the host can set
- Rounds before the vote
- 1 to 5. More rounds give the impostor more chances to slip — but also more time to work out their word.
- Games in a row
- 1 to 10. Points add up; the standings appear after the last one.
- Mr White
- From five players up. Adds chaos: someone is bluffing completely.
- Time limit per turn
- 10 to 120 seconds. No answer in time and the turn passes.
- Word language
- French or English, for the whole room. Separate from the display language, which each player picks for themselves.
Where the words come from
This is the unusual part. Most Undercover clones ship a hand-written list: you exhaust it in a few evenings. Here, the pairs are computed.
A semantic model places every word next to its closest neighbours in meaning. But raw closeness is not enough — it offers as many bad pairs as good ones. Four filters run behind it.
Same root. The game would be over on the first clue.
Synonyms. Nobody could tell them apart, however well they played.
Too far apart. The impostor stands out on the first pass.
Too abstract. Impossible to describe out loud without going in circles.
And since a word has several possible partners, cat can come up with dog, rabbit, rat or tiger. No two games feel the same.