Guides
Situation puzzles online with friends: calls and chats
Illustration: Every Morning at Seven
A situation puzzle, the yes-or-no riddle game where one person knows the ending, is one of the few party games that survives a video call, and it works just as well in writing. Two things break at a distance. Turn-taking goes first: on a call, everyone talks at once or nobody does. Then the table’s memory: in a chat, the one yes that mattered scrolls away under forty messages. Both are easy to fix, and the fix is different for a call, a chat, and a game that runs all week.
In this article
What stays the same: one person knows the story
Online or around a table, someone has to host. They read the solution alone before the game and answer only yes, no or irrelevant. Everything in our host’s guide applies, from preparing the story to giving hints. What follows only covers what distance changes.
Post Mortem has no multiplayer mode and no narrator on this website: the narrator in the app answers one person, on their phone. A group playing at a distance therefore needs a human who knows the solution.
Send the statement once
At a table, the statement is read aloud and then sits on the card. At a distance, everyone needs the exact same words to go back to, because a riddle often hangs on the one word somebody skimmed. Don’t retype it from memory and don’t summarise it. A summary already carries an interpretation, and it’s yours.
Sharing a riddle from the app sends its title, the full statement and a link, never the solution. For a free riddle, that link goes to its page on this site, which has the whole statement and its artwork and no answer. You can also copy that page’s address from the library. Send it once, at the start. When someone asks what the exact wording was, point them back to it instead of paraphrasing.
On this site
On a video call
Zoom, Teams, Meet, Discord: it hardly matters which. The real problem is lag. Two people ask at once, the audio clips, and the host says yes without knowing to whom. Four habits take care of it.
- One host, camera on. Players read a lot from a face, which is one more reason for the host to keep theirs still.
- An order for questions. With more than four players, raise hands, on screen or for real. With fewer, go round in the same order every time, and let anyone pass.
- The host repeats the question before answering. “Did she know the man? Yes.” It costs two seconds and settles most misheard questions.
- A scribe keeps the confirmed facts in the call’s chat: the yeses, the noes that closed a line, the irrelevants. Answers only, one line each, not a transcript of the questions.
Pacing a game on a call
Share your screen on the riddle’s page while you read it, then stop sharing. Once the questions start, faces matter more than the artwork, and a shared screen shrinks everyone to a thumbnail.
When the game stalls, read the statement again, slowly. On a call that’s the first hint that works, because nobody has the text in front of them any more. Have the scribe read out their list every ten questions or so, too. Hearing all the facts in one go makes it easier to see how they connect.
In a group chat
Situation puzzles work surprisingly well over text, because nothing disappears: every question and every answer stays on screen, in order. The risk is the opposite of a call. Nothing gets lost, but everything gets buried, and by message thirty nobody can find the yes that mattered. WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal or a Discord channel, the method is the same.
- One question per message, numbered. The first person writes “1.”, the next “2.”. If two people grab the same number, whoever was slower renumbers.
- The host answers with the number and one word: “7: no.” Nothing else. A “no, but…” is a hint, and in a chat it stays up for good.
- Two questions in one get “split it”. Same rule as at a table, but you’ll use it more often in writing, since people have time to build long, branching questions.
- Keep the list of confirmed facts where everyone can see it. If your app lets you pin a message, pin one and have the host update it. If not, the host reposts it every ten questions.
- Theories go somewhere else. A side chat without the host, or a thread: players can argue as much as they like there, and the main thread holds only questions and answers. In writing, five three-paragraph theories push the answers off the screen, so whoever has one breaks it into closed questions and asks them one at a time.
A slow game over several days
Text lets you do something a table can’t: stretch the game out. One question per person per day, asked whenever it suits them, and the host answers in the evening. It suits friends spread across time zones, or any group that can never find the same free hour.
It changes how people play. With one question a day, nobody wastes theirs. They reread the facts, check the question hasn’t been asked, and look for the one that cuts the possibilities in half. So pick a harder riddle than you would for a call, two or three stars, or it will fall on day two.
Agree on the ending before you start. The simplest rule: when someone thinks they’ve got it, they post the whole story in the main thread, in one message. The host checks it against their list of facts and replies “that’s it” or “something’s missing”, without saying what. Once it’s solved, the host tells the full story, in writing or as a voice note. Set a deadline too. If nobody has it after ten days, the host tells it anyway.
When nobody can host
Sometimes nobody wants to know the ending. Then everyone can investigate the same riddle on their own, with the narrator in the app, and compare notes once everyone is done. It isn’t a shared game any more, but comparing where each of you got stuck makes a decent conversation.