How to play Doppelgänger

The four modes at a glance

Every mode is free. There is no base game hiding behind a paywall — Premium changes the size of the room and which prompt packs you can draw from, not which modes you can play.

What you need

One phone, laptop, or tablet per player, and a way to talk to each other — in the same room, on a call, or on video. Nobody downloads anything and nobody has to make an account. The game creates an anonymous session for you on your first visit.

Three players is the minimum for all four modes. The free tier caps a room at eight; Premium raises it to twelve. Most modes get better with numbers — six to nine is the sweet spot, where there are enough answers on the board to be genuinely confusing but few enough that reading them all doesn’t drag.

Setting up a room

One person creates the room and becomes the host. You pick a nickname, get a randomly generated character avatar, choose the mode, set how many rounds to play, and pick the language the prompts should be in. Free rooms run 3 to 5 rounds; Premium goes to 10.

The room gets a four-character code. The alphabet it draws from deliberately leaves out O, 0, I, and 1, so there is no argument about whether that is a letter or a number when someone reads it out across a room. Share the code — or the join link, which fills it in automatically — and everyone else lands in the lobby.

The host starts the game when everyone is in. If the host closes their tab or drops, the game does not die: the longest-connected player is automatically promoted and the round carries on.

Masquerade

The disguise game. Everyone answers the same prompt, all the answers appear anonymously as lettered cards, and then you match every card to the person you think wrote it. Your own answer is shown to you but excluded from your guessing, so you cannot score a point for identifying yourself.

You earn two separate kinds of point and your round score is the sum of them:

That two-sided structure is what stops the mode collapsing into one strategy. Optimise only for hiding and you stop noticing anyone else’s tells, so your detective score goes to zero. Optimise only for reading the room and you write naturally, everyone places you instantly, and you leak disguise points every round. The two pull against each other.

Disguise points also scale with group size: in a twelve-player game one well-hidden answer is worth up to eleven points, because every other player can get it wrong. In a four-player game the same answer caps at three. Big games reward audacity; small games reward accuracy.

Punchline

The comedy mode, and the most forgiving one — there is nothing to deduce and nothing to hide. Everyone answers the same comedy setup, then the answers appear anonymously and everyone upvotes their favourite. Authors stay hidden through the vote and are unmasked at the reveal, so nobody wins on reputation.

The consolation point for backing the winner matters more than it looks. It means a player who is not funny that round still has something to play for, and it rewards taste as well as delivery. If several answers tie on votes, they all count as winners.

Punchline is the mode to pick for a group that does not know each other well. The other three depend on being able to recognise how your friends think; this one does not, so it works with colleagues, mixed groups, and anyone joining for the first time.

Mimic

The impressions mode, and the one that inverts the whole premise. Everyone is secretly assigned another player and answers the prompt as them. Then the room works out who was doing whom.

Assignment is a single cycle over a shuffled roster, which means everybody impersonates exactly one person and is impersonated by exactly one person, and nobody ever draws themselves. So every player is somewhere on the board twice — once as a writer, once as a subject.

Scoring is mutual, and this is the key thing to understand about the mode:

In Masquerade you want to be invisible. In Mimic you want to be legible — your points come from other people recognising your impression, so a subtle, tasteful impersonation scores nothing at all. Go broad. Reach for the thing that person always says. The mode rewards the obvious joke, which is why it plays completely differently from everything else on the list despite using the same cross-match screen.

Impostor

The odd one out — a word game rather than a writing game, and the only mode that is turn-based. Everyone in the room is shown the same secret word, except one player, who gets a different word from the same category. The impostor is not told they are the impostor.

Play goes around the table and each player types a single word describing theirs. The bar is: specific enough to prove you know the word, vague enough not to hand it over. The clue passes around twice, so you get two turns and you see everyone else’s first clue before your second. You have 25 seconds per turn — miss it and the turn is forfeited and play moves on.

After the second pass, the room gets 45 seconds to vote on who was working from the wrong word. If more than half the votes cast land on the real impostor, they are caught.

What makes it work is that the impostor is playing blind. Because their word comes from the same category, their clues look honest — they are honest — and the round turns on how near the two words happen to sit. A near-miss pair is nearly unwinnable for the room; a distant pair is nearly unwinnable for the impostor.

Both the word and the impostor are drawn inside the database, so a host who happens to be the impostor learns nothing from their own browser. Turn order is reshuffled every round, because going first is hardest — no clues to lean on — and going last is where an impostor can most easily blend in.

Timing

In Masquerade, Punchline, and Mimic, the answering phase is capped at 75 seconds and the guessing or voting phase at 90. Both end early once everyone has locked in, so you do not sit watching a clock nobody needs. Impostor runs on its own timings: 25 seconds per clue turn and 45 seconds for the vote.

The reveal has no timer at all. That is deliberate — it is the part people actually want to linger on, and it is where the game happens.

Prompts, packs, and languages

Prompts are drawn from a curated library and each room tracks what it has already used, so you will not see the same question twice in a session. Masquerade and Mimic draw open questions, Punchline draws comedy setups, and Impostor draws word pairs instead of prompts. Packs let you pitch the game at the table you have actually got:

The library is available in Arabic, English, French, Spanish, German, Turkish, and Portuguese. Language is set per room by the host, so a room plays entirely in whichever language was picked at creation.

If someone drops out

Players who lose connection are marked as disconnected rather than removed, and can rejoin with the same code and keep their score. A round will not stall waiting for someone who has gone: each phase advances either when everyone still connected has submitted or when the timer expires, whichever comes first. In Impostor, play walks straight past a player who has dropped rather than burning their 25 seconds.

Where to go next

The rules are the easy part. If you want to actually win, the two strategy guides below are the ones to read — one on making yourself unreadable, one on reading everyone else. Both are written around Masquerade, and most of the second one transfers directly to Mimic.