Tarot
Cards for each of you, or one shared spread; inbetween reads them as a lens, not a prophecy.
A different way to talk to each other
The game you play
to chat.
Every other app hands you a chat window and hopes something good happens in it. This one hands you a turn. You answer. They answer. Neither of you sees the other until you have both gone — and then it all lands at once.
Sealed
Your answer is invisible until theirs exists.
Both at once
You see everything in the same second they do.
Yours
Nothing crosses to them unless you allow it.
inbetween is best on the app — notifications actually arrive.
The rules
Five of them,
and they are all the same rule.
Every one of these is a property of how the thing is built, not a promise about how we intend to behave.
Nobody goes first. You answer where they cannot see. They answer where you cannot see.
Nothing crosses until you allow it. Not a setting you turn on. It is how the thing is built.
You may say the unfair version. Say it to inbetween, as badly as it actually sounds in your head. It is not being delivered.
You both see everything in the same second. No first look, no head start, no time to adjust your answer.
There is no score. The point is the gap between what you guessed and what they said.
What you are playing for
The gap between
the two answers.
Ask two people who does more around the house. Whoever speaks first sets the terms, and the second person is no longer answering the question — they are negotiating with an answer. It happens instantly, it happens to everybody, and it is not dishonesty. It is what anyone does when the terms have already been set.
Take the order away and you get two honest pictures that do not match. That mismatch is the whole game. It is also, reliably, the most interesting ten minutes of the evening.
The researchers who built the most famous set of closeness questions quietly agreed with this, though nobody quotes the bit where they did: when it came time to measure how close the pairs felt, they made them move as far apart in the room as possible first. That story is here.
The nine
Two minutes,
or the rest of the week.
Played from your own phones, in the same room or a thousand miles apart, awake at the same time or not.
Values
Pick your 10 of 50, and the 10 you think are theirs. See where you overlap and where you guessed wrong.
Know me
Ten questions about each of you. Answer for yourself and guess their answers. Scored.
Would you rather
Ten dilemmas. Both choose; see how often you'd choose the same.
Love languages
Your top two of five, and the two you think are theirs.
Appreciation
Three things you appreciate about each other, revealed at the same moment.
Life balance
Rate eight areas of life: how it is now, how you'd want it. Compare the gaps.
36 questions
One of the closeness questions, answered blind by both, then revealed.
Who does what
Twelve everyday tasks: who usually does them, and who should. Where your pictures differ.
Why a game and not a conversation
Because a conversation asks you
to be calm first.
Every communication exercise ever written asks you to listen generously at exactly the moment you are least able to. There is a line about this in the 1998 paper that started the argument, from a therapist called Daniel Wile — that it is impossible to make an I-statement when you are in the wanting-revenge state of mind, because at that moment you cannot remember what one is and you do not care.
A game does not ask. You take a turn, on your own, when you feel like it. Nobody is watching your face while you decide what to say. The longer version of that argument is here, and it is more interesting than we expected.
There is also a finding we did not expect to exist. In a study of 239 people, the same interview was run twice — and participants told they were speaking to a computer rather than to a person showed lower fear of being judged, less impression management, expressed sadness more openly, and were rated by observers as more willing to disclose. It is called “It’s only a computer”, it was run on health screening rather than on couples, and the mechanism is the one this is built on: people say the true thing more easily to something that cannot think less of them.
And the honest part, which we would rather say than have you find out: a game like this reliably buys you a good evening and a real short-term lift. Nothing published shows a deck of questions changes a relationship a year later, ours included. We wrote that down too.
And when it stops being a game
The same mechanic carries
the thing you have been avoiding.
The sealing is not a party trick. It is the reason you can write the version you would never send — the unfair one, the one with the accusation in it — and have it go somewhere it will be understood rather than somewhere it will land.
You talk to inbetween. They talk to inbetween. It is the only one who hears both sides, so it can carry what you meant across without carrying how you said it. And when something is bigger than an evening, it says so, and it keeps saying so.
inbetween is best on the app — notifications actually arrive.