IceBreak Hub

Online icebreaker games for English voice chat rooms and conversation classes. The host shares their screen while participants respond via voice — no camera, no app, no login required.

Everything secret (the taboo card, the jury's vote, each actor's role) is dealt to each player's phone through a private link, so it never appears on the screen the host is sharing.

Games

Game	Players	Description
💬 Let's Talk	2–9	A conversation mode: think first, optionally share a written thought, then take one main turn each round with spoken follow-up requests
🐺 聊天狼人	3–12 (6–8 recommended)	Six guided conversation rounds with a hidden Wolf team, two shared missions, scheduled identifications, and no elimination
⚖️ Kangaroo Court	4–9	One player stands trial on a ridiculous charge. Prosecutor and defense make their case, the jury secretly votes twice — before and after
🏰 Dare Conquest	2–6	Roll the dice, move around the board, and pull off a silly dare — confess, sing, joke, roast — to claim the land, or steal it from a rival
🙊 Say It Without Saying It	2–6	One player describes a secret word without saying the forbidden words, one referees, and everyone else hits the buzzer to guess
🔥 Pick a Side!	2+	Spin for a bold opinion; everyone votes 👍 / 🤷 / 👎 from their own card and the tally fills in live
🤔 Sophie's Choice	2+	A morally impossible situation with two extreme choices — pick one and defend it, or take option C and argue your own
🤝 Persuade Together!	3+	One player is dealt the judge, everyone else teams up to convince them
🎭 You're In The Scene	2–6	Draw a chaotic situation — every player is dealt their own role and hint. No script, just improv
📖 Once Upon a Time	2–6	Tell one fairy tale together, play Story Cards, interrupt to take over, and finish with your private Ending
🖼️ Dixit / 妙語說書人	3–8	Give spoken clues for 84 original pictures, submit decoys, secretly vote, and reveal the answer together
🎉 BLUFF PARTY	3–9	One strange topic, one real expert: make up explanations, question each other, and find the truth in one continuous conversation
WORD WOLF	3–9	Describe your secret item, then privately vote for the one player holding a different item
WHO KNOWS?	4–9	Insider or Werewolf roles with a secret word or number; optional broad starting clue
WORD LIMIT THEATER	2–9	Take turns acting a scene with your own short word limit; short limits may repeat

How it works

BLUFF PARTY uses the existing room/player links, Classic and Halloween topics, private roles, Spotlight, and automatic scoring. Bluffers can open optional story starting points on their own cards and freely ignore them. Its independent executor keeps the game running after the host page closes. See bluff-king-mode.md for modes, knowledge history and the accepted trust boundary. No new environment variables or backend credentials are required.

WORD WOLF, WORD LIMIT THEATER and WHO KNOWS? also reuse the original player links. Their canonical tables run through the players' cards; the host page can close after starting. See word-wolf-mode.md, word-limit-mode.md and who-knows-mode.md for rules and privacy limits. WORD WOLF restores the original 80 pairs, with a dedicated gouache-style illustration for each of the 160 words across all 80 pairs.

Dixit retains its original Hub entry. Its prominent phase bar tells each player what to do, and a shared 3–2–1 reveal presents the Storyteller's card before the highest-voted pictures. Designate the host player when opening the table; that player's private card handles every game control as well as their own hand and vote. A host card in the browser that owns the saved Hub room also runs synchronization while hidden whenever the browser permits execution, so the shared table may be hidden or closed. A visible host page can immediately take over a hidden executor. Reopening the HOST card in a new tab in the same trusted browser recovers immediately, including when closing the old tab could not finish releasing its lease. If the browser suspends every host page or the device sleeps, queued actions resume when a host page wakes. Host cards on another device use the open shared table for synchronization. Revealed pictures identify their owners above the artwork; no enlargement buttons or repeated Storyteller label cover the cards. Both reveal headings show their vote counts. Round points stay beside the pictures on the left until the host continues; phones show them below the pictures. Players and scores appear below the cards, expanded by default. Private-hand identity and duplicate spoken clue labels are omitted so the pictures start higher on the page. The host chooses a winning score from 5–100 before dealing (default 30). To switch into Dixit or Once Upon a Time from another game, open its host page and click Open this table. The existing player links switch to the new lobby; the previous game does not need an End button. See dixit-mode.md for rules, original artwork, privacy, and validation.

Once Upon a Time reuses the original room and private player links. See once-upon-a-time-mode.md for its rules, deck/art counts, trusted-host limits, launch steps and verification. The host keeps its shared table open and can deal immediately without waiting for everyone to tap Ready. Participants play from their own existing cards. ?demo=1 is a clearly labelled synthetic preview only.

• index.html is the menu; each game has its own host page.
• play.html is the single player card page shared by the Hub's linked-card games — it switches layout from the game field in the room data.
• One room code and one set of player links work across every game, so the host can switch games without re-sending anything.
• 聊天狼人 is intentionally separate from the legacy card links. Players join its lobby by room code and keep an opaque reconnect token on their own device. Like the other games, it uses the existing Firebase and trusts the host browser.
• CLAUDE.md is the architecture log (written in Chinese): what every screen does and, more usefully, why each decision was made. Read it before changing anything shared — room.js, play.html, index.html, game-data.js, i18n.js, shared.css are relied on across the site.

Let's Talk — first trial

Choose Let's Talk after the usual room setup; existing player links update automatically. The host opens a topic and keeps that page open. Participants use their own cards to signal readiness, request an oral question, invite the question, and pass their main turn. Voice stays in your existing chat app.

Try lets-talk.html?demo=1 on one phone without a room. Choose a topic, then switch the demo viewpoint between the shared screen and four participants. This simulation does not connect player cards and resets on reload.

Rules, synchronization design, limits, and verification steps are documented in talk-mode.md. Topics use plain English; interface controls follow the site's Chinese / English switch. There are no scores, reaction totals, required story lengths, or AI evaluations.

Choose from 48 topics across 8 categories, with 4 follow-ups each (240 questions in total), or write your own topic. Search in Chinese or English, preview a discussion path, and adapt a library topic. Custom drafts are saved in the current browser. During a conversation, the host can choose a deeper question or write one on the spot; it updates everyone's page while keeping the current speaker, round, and spoken question requests.

A random question is ready at the top when the page opens. Draw another, choose manually, or browse full questions and their follow-ups at the bottom. Picking a question only changes the preview until you open it for everyone. Prominent host controls can end a turn or return from a question if someone leaves. The speaker's card shows a gold Your turn! banner and an I'm done button.

Each built-in topic includes an explanation of what the question means, its key terms, and a way to begin answering. The host can turn Show question explanations (trial) on or off for everyone's cards without interrupting a turn. Custom topics can include their own explanation (up to 600 characters).

Firebase

Live host → player sync runs on a free Firebase Realtime Database. Copy your own project's values into firebase-config.js (setup steps and the required database rules are documented at the top of that file). The file ships with a real project's values already in it, so this is a swap, not a fill-in-the-blank — see Running your own copy.

Without Firebase configured:

• Let's Talk needs Firebase for real rooms. Its single-device demo works without a database connection.
• Button is locked — Kangaroo Court and Say It Without Saying It refuse to deal at all (the jury's votes and the clue giver's word have nowhere private to go).
• Still fully playable — the rest. They only lose the on-phone voting and buzzer interactions; the host screen carries the whole game.
• 聊天狼人 needs the same existing Firebase configuration and an open host page.

Chat Wolf host mode (2026-09-27)

The separate Admin API has been removed. chat-wolf-sync.js uses the existing Firebase REST API and bearer paths under rooms/chatwolf-{CODE}. No additional credentials, paid service, or Rules changes are needed on the current site. The host must keep the page open. Its normal villager interface hides other roles and tasks, but the host browser necessarily receives the full game state. This is an honesty-based host model, not protection against a host inspecting developer tools. See chat-wolf-mode.md for persistence, reconnect behavior, and the exact privacy boundary.

Running your own copy

Fork it or clone it. All games are buildless static pages. Three things need doing before a separate copy works.

1. Point it at your own Firebase project

firebase-config.js is committed with a real project's values in it, not blanks. Clone the repo, skip this step, and nothing breaks and no error appears — the games quietly read and write to somebody else's database. Replace every value with your own before you play a single round:

const FIREBASE_CONFIG = {
  apiKey: "...",
  authDomain: "...",
  databaseURL: "...",
  projectId: "...",
};

Setup takes about five minutes on the free tier. The steps, and the database rules you have to paste in, are in the comment block at the top of that same file. The rules are not optional — they are the only thing keeping one player's link from reading everyone else's cards.

2. Serve it over HTTP, not file://

git clone <your fork>
cd livechat
python3 -m http.server 8000   # then open http://localhost:8000/index.html

Double-clicking the HTML files opens them as file://, which breaks the room state (kept in localStorage) and the Firebase connection.

3. Deploy it somewhere public — the player cards cannot be tested locally

This is the step that is easy to miss. Every game deals its secrets to play.html, which players open on their own phones. A phone cannot reach the localhost on your laptop, so with only a local server you can drive all every host screen perfectly and never once see a player card — half of each game (buzzers, votes, the jury, Truth or Dare calls) lives on that page.

All games, including Chat Wolf, can use a static HTTPS host:

• Vercel — what the live site runs on
• GitHub Pages, Netlify, or another static HTTPS host also works with the Firebase configuration.

Deployed files are public even when the repo is private: anyone can fetch /firebase-config.js from the deployed site. That is expected and safe as long as step 1's database rules are in place — see SECURITY.md.

Features

• Screen-share friendly: large text, high contrast, clean layout
• Game prompts live in game-data.js; Let's Talk's topics live in talk-topics.js. The host can override the former from a Google Sheet whose tabs are named after the games. prompt-sheet-template.xlsx mirrors that sheet, and tools/ keeps the two in step: build-sheet-template.py writes the workbook from game-data.js, and sheet-to-game-data.py folds an edited workbook back into game-data.js. Both parse through the site's own parseTab(), so what the site reads and what ships as the fallback cannot drift apart.
• Player links can be handed out as a copyable list or as QR codes

Stack

Vanilla HTML / CSS / JavaScript — no build step, no backend.

• Firebase Realtime Database (compat SDK, loaded from CDN) for host → player sync
• qrcode.js — vendored qrcode-generator 1.4.4 (MIT)

Rule and transport regression tests require only Node.js:

node --test tests/*.test.cjs

Dixit picture storytelling

Dixit supports 3–8 players, spoken clues without a text field, 84 original varied picture cards, secret submissions and votes, automatic current base-game scoring, and replay. Large cards stay central on desktop and phones, without separate enlargement controls. Revealed card owners appear above each picture. It uses the same player links as the other games. The public host table never renders private hands. dixit-card-host.js lets the designated host's private card run the trusted-host executor using credentials already saved in that browser; keep the shared table open/awake when the host card uses another browser or device. Artwork is versioned to preserve active games. See dixit-mode.md for rules, source links, recovery behavior, and verification limits. Local previews: npm run dev:dixit; rule/transport/UI checks: npm run test:dixit.

License

PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 — see LICENSE. Free to use, change, and share for any noncommercial purpose, including schools and other educational institutions. Commercial use, such as selling it or running it in paid classes, needs a separate licence from the copyright holder.

qrcode.js is third-party (qrcode-generator, MIT) and keeps its own licence.