Riya's fourteenth question, read aloud so nobody has to look up from the road.
The hook
Every family's 20-questions game eventually collapses into an argument: "that's not fair, you changed your mind," or "you can't think of something that specific." I'm Thinking Of… ends it by handing the secret to the app. The thinker draws a real card from a real deck — animal, object, person, place — locks it in, and now there's no relitigating. Guessers spend a shrinking pool of question tokens, the app reads each question aloud so eyes never leave the window, and the tension of a dwindling token count does more to keep a car quiet than any parent ever has.
A sample round
1 · Kabir secretly locks in Great White Shark
2 · Two tokens left, Riya narrows in
3 · The payoff: correct guess, one token to spare
How a round plays
- The thinker secretly draws a card from the app's deck (animals, objects, people, places) — no arguing about fairness, the app dealt it.
- Guessers share a pool of question tokens (usually 20); the app can read each question aloud via Web Speech, so nobody needs to look at a screen.
- The thinker answers out loud — a tap logs "Yes" or "No" and burns one token, and the running list stays visible to reason from.
- Guessers can cash in a "guess the thing" attempt any time; a wrong guess costs bonus tokens.
- Run out of tokens, or nail the answer, and the deck deals the next round — score is tokens saved, not just wins.
Why it's sticky
The secret-card deck removes the one thing that ruins this game on paper — disputes about whether the thinker is playing fair — so the group can focus entirely on the fun part: deduction under a shrinking budget. The token economy turns every question into a small bet, which is its own kind of tension, and because the app reads questions aloud, it's one of the only genuinely eyes-free games in the lineup — perfect for a driving parent who wants to play without becoming a hazard.
Modes
- Co-op Deduction — the whole car versus one thinker, tokens shared.
- Duel — two guessers race head-to-head for fewest tokens spent.
- Category Packs — unlock harder decks: abstract concepts, historical figures, famous duos.
Build notes
Size: M. The real work — and why this is the one Build M in the cluster — is the secret-card deck: a large, curated dataset per category with enough tagged attributes (habitat, size, era, alive/not) that yes/no answers stay unambiguous, plus fuzzy-matched guess checking against each card's name and aliases. The shared shell supplies the token/score tracker, pass-the-phone handoff, how-to-play screen, and a reusable Web Speech "read this string aloud" helper (also used by Storyteller's Dice). Game logic — deck, tokens, answers — lives in a plain JS module decoupled from speech and rendering, so a future link-based async duel doesn't require touching the deck or the token math.