About Doppelgänger
An independently built party game about writing anonymously and being recognised anyway. No app store, no install, no account required.
Last updated: August 2, 2026
What it is
Doppelgänger is a free online party game for 3 to 12 players. Everyone answers the same prompt, the answers appear anonymously, and then you try to work out who wrote each one. You score for identifying other people correctly and, separately, for being the one nobody can place.
It is built for the situation most party games handle badly: a group split across different places, on a call, with about half an hour, who don’t want to spend ten minutes on setup. Everything runs in the browser, joining is a four-character code, and the first round starts within a minute of someone deciding to play.
Why it works the way it does
A few decisions in the design were deliberate, and they’re the ones that make the game feel different from the format it superficially resembles.
Scoring both sides
Rewarding good deduction alone produces a game where the correct strategy is to write nothing memorable. Rewarding good hiding alone produces a game nobody bothers reading. Scoring both, in the same round, forces a real trade-off — you cannot maximise one without giving up the other.
A short clock
75 seconds to answer is not an arbitrary number. Given three minutes, people edit themselves into a uniform, cautious voice and the round gets boring. Given 75 seconds, you write something closer to how you actually think — which is exactly what makes the reveal land.
Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for
Every account wall between deciding to play and playing loses part of the group. An anonymous session is created for you on first visit and that is enough to do everything. Signing in is available, and optional.
Server-enforced secrecy
Answers are hidden from other players by database access rules, not by hiding them in the browser. Until a room reaches the reveal, other players genuinely cannot read what you wrote — there is no client-side trick that exposes it.
Languages
The prompt library is written and maintained in seven languages: Arabic, English, French, Spanish, German, Turkish, and Portuguese. These are translations in the real sense rather than machine output pointed at a wordlist — a prompt that is funny in English and flat in Turkish is not a good Turkish prompt, and gets rewritten rather than shipped. Arabic is fully right-to-left, typeset in an Arabic face rather than a Latin one with the letters reversed.
How it is paid for
Doppelgänger is independently built and self-funded. It stays free because of two things: ads shown between rounds on the free tier, and a $3.99/month Premium subscription that removes them, raises the player and round limits, and unlocks the extra prompt packs and custom prompts. All four game modes are free — Premium changes the size of the room, not what you can play.
There is no venture funding behind it and no plan to sell your data — the privacy policy is short because there is not much to disclose. If you would rather support it without subscribing, there is a Ko-fi link on the home page.
Contact
Bug reports, prompt suggestions, translation corrections, and press enquiries all go to the same place: ahmad.aboud2002@gmail.com. A real person reads it. If you are reporting something that went wrong during a game, including the room code makes it much easier to track down.