How to disguise your writing style
A guide to Masquerade, the mode where being unreadable is worth points. Most players lose disguise points for reasons that have nothing to do with what they said — they get caught on punctuation, on sentence length, on a joke everyone has heard them make before. Here is what actually gives people away, and what to do instead.
Last updated: August 2, 2026
You are not caught on content. You are caught on habits.
New players assume they’ll be identified by what they wrote — that the answer about the dog will be traced to the person with the dog. That happens, but it’s the minority of it. Far more often you get caught on mechanical habits you don’t know you have, because nobody has ever had a reason to point them out to you.
Read a few rounds of reveals with this in mind and you’ll start to see it. The person who never capitalises. The person who ends everything on an ellipsis. The person whose answers are always exactly one clause. These are stable across rounds, they’re invisible to the person doing them, and they’re the first thing an experienced guesser looks at.
The five tells that catch most people
1. Capitalisation and punctuation
Whether you start sentences with a capital, whether you bother with a full stop at the end, whether you use an em dash — this is the single most reliable fingerprint in the game, and it’s completely automatic. You are not thinking about it while you type. Everyone else is reading it.
2. Length
People are remarkably consistent about how much they write. If you always produce three lines and everyone else produces one, the three-line card is yours before anyone has read a word of it.
3. Your one joke
Everyone has a register they default to under time pressure — the deadpan one, the absurdist one, the one who always goes filthy. Seventy-five seconds is exactly the kind of pressure that makes you reach for it.
4. Verifiable specifics
Naming your city, your job, your ex, your cat. One concrete detail your friends can check against what they know about you is worth more to them than an entire paragraph of style.
5. Trying too hard
An answer that is conspicuously unlike anything you’d normally write reads as exactly that: someone hiding. Cards that feel deliberately styleless stand out in a set of natural ones, and the table converges on whoever was quiet.
Borrow a voice instead of erasing yours
The instinct is to write as blandly as possible. This is the wrong move and it’s the most common mistake in the game. Blandness is itself a signature — it says someone here is being careful, and it puts you on the shortlist. Worse, a bland answer is boring to reveal, which is most of the fun.
The better approach is to write in a voice that isn’t yours but is definitely somebody’s. Pick a specific person at the table and write the answer they would write. It gives you concrete rules to follow instead of a vague instruction to be neutral, and it costs your target real detective points, because guesses aimed at them land on you.
If you don’t want to impersonate a specific player, borrow a stance instead. Answer sincerely if you’re usually a joker. Answer with a flat, boring fact if you’re usually sincere. Write in the second person. Ask a question back. Any of these gives the card an author who is clearly not you.
Practical rules that survive the clock
- Change one mechanical habit per round. Capitalise if you never do. Add a full stop if you never do. It takes no thinking time and it defeats the most reliable tell.
- Match the room’s length. Glance at how long answers have been running and land in the middle of that range rather than at your usual extreme.
- Cut the checkable detail. Keep the story, remove the proper noun. “My old flatmate” travels; “Dave from Leeds” does not.
- Commit early. Rewriting drifts you back toward your natural voice — first drafts are disguised, third drafts are you again. Write it, change one habit, lock it in.
- Vary across rounds. A disguise you reuse becomes a signature by round three. If you were terse last round, be expansive this one.
The reveal is where you actually leak
Plenty of players write a perfect answer and then give it away in the next ninety seconds. You laugh a beat early at your own card. You go quiet while everyone else is speculating. You argue slightly too hard that card C is definitely Sam’s.
If you’re playing on video or in the same room, the safest posture during scoring is to be equally engaged with every card. React to all of them or none of them. The most disciplined thing you can do is guess out loud — confidently and wrongly — about the card you wrote.
Know when not to hide
Disguise points scale with the number of players. In a large game, hiding is worth a lot — every player who misses your card is another point. In a four-player game your answer is worth at most three disguise points, and the same effort spent reading the other three players will usually pay better.
So play the size of the table. Big group: be unrecognisable, take the swing. Small group: write naturally, spend your attention on everyone else, and win on detective points instead.