Comparisons
Black stories or Post Mortem: a host at the table, or solo?
Illustration: The Match in the Desert
Black stories and Post Mortem run on the same pleasure: a strange scene, a string of yes-or-no questions, and the moment the story clicks. What separates them is who answers. The card game needs a friend who has read the solution. Post Mortem is a phone app of situation puzzles whose narrator answers when nobody else is around, and whose stories you can also host yourself. This comparison is written by LaBoîteBleue, the studio that publishes Post Mortem, so read it knowing that.
In this article
| Criterion | Post Mortem | black stories (classic box) |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | Mobile app, iOS and Android | Card game |
| Who answers questions | The app’s narrator, or a human host | A game leader who has read the card |
| Play alone | Yes | No, someone has to lead |
| What you need | A phone and a connection | The box and a host |
| Scoring | None between players | Optional chips over three rounds |
| Something to share at the table | No, it is an app | Yes, a box of cards |
| The solution, for a host | Once solved, or with its pack | On the back of every card |
Compiled by LaBoîteBleue, the publisher of Post Mortem, from the official pages cited below, checked September 29, 2026.
How the black stories box plays
In the rules on its site, publisher moses. has the group pick a game leader. That person draws a card, reads the front and the back in silence, then reads the riddle aloud and shows its picture. Everyone else asks questions in any order, as long as the leader can answer them with a clear yes or no. The leader can also say a question doesn't matter, steer the group off a false lead or insist on a rephrasing. The riddle is solved once the group has pieced together what happened in outline, and the leader then reads the full story.
The rules give two ways to play. In the competitive one, the leader hands out chips for questions that hit an essential part of the solution, over three rounds, and whoever holds the most chips wins. In the team version nobody keeps score. This article compares that classic box. Other games in the range have their own rules, and if you find a phone app called black stories, check its store listing to see who publishes it.
Sources
What a human host brings
There is a particular pleasure in watching friends build an increasingly elaborate theory while you know that one small assumption is wrong. A human host reads the mood, lets a silence run and decides with the group when to offer a hint. For a social evening, that performance can be as memorable as the answer.
A box is also a shared object. You pick a card, set it aside, hand the next one to someone else, and the host's seat goes round the table. If that ritual is the point of your evening, give it weight. An app can be worth having without copying every gesture of a table game, but it won't replace this one.
Can you play alone?
Not with the box: someone has to have read the card, and that person can't also be the one investigating. Post Mortem is built so you can. The app's narrator answers your closed questions with yes, no or irrelevant. You phrase them however you like and follow your own suspicions, with no menu of suggested answers to pick from. Facts start hidden on screen and become readable as your questions earn them, so you can see what you have established and what is still missing.
So you can open a story nobody around you has read, on a train, in a waiting room, at the end of a dinner. You need your phone and a connection. Questions to the narrator come with a daily allowance unless you own the complete bundle. The moment we care about is the one both formats share: a fact you took as obvious turns out to be an assumption, and the whole scene rearranges itself.
Hosting a Post Mortem riddle at the table
Post Mortem stories work with a human host too, on one condition: the host must be able to read the solution. In the app, a solution opens once you have solved that riddle. Owning a pack opens that pack's solutions straight away, and the complete bundle opens all of them. The free riddle pages on this site show the opening scene only, never the answer. An evening then runs like this:
- Pick the host and the riddle: one the host has solved or whose pack they own, and that nobody else at the table has played.
- The host reads the solution alone, in the app, until they could tell it without looking.
- Read the statement aloud. For a free riddle, open its page on this site too, so everyone can reread the exact words.
- Answer yes, no or irrelevant, as with the box. Send back any question that can't be answered that way.
- When someone tells the story in outline, the host confirms it and reads the solution out.
Which one suits your evening
For us, a dark riddle has to be fun before the reveal. We write for questions that lead somewhere, a short statement where every sentence stays literally true, and an explanation that accounts for the whole scene. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, not a verdict on anyone else's cards.
If you want a physical game, a friend in the host's seat and maybe chips on the table, the classic box is the natural pick. Post Mortem keeps no score between players, so a group that likes the chips can tally them on paper. If you also want to investigate when nobody else is around, try Post Mortem: read a few free opening scenes first and see whether our kind of dark riddle is for you.