How to play, and how to run a night people ask to repeat.

A round is twenty cards, and you can stop on any of them

Chinwag deals exactly twenty cards per round. A thin progress bar fills across the top as you go, in the colour of whichever deck the current card came from. There is no timer, no score and nothing to win. If the group is done at card nine, press End round.

Ending a round, early or at twenty, brings up a single number: how many questions the room survived. From there you can play another round with the same decks, change decks, or share that number with someone who was not there. Nothing about your answers leaves the phone, because nothing about your answers is ever stored.

Two smaller things that matter more than they sound. The screen stays awake while a card is up, so the phone never locks halfway through somebody's answer. And if the round is interrupted, by a doorbell or a flat battery, reopening Chinwag puts you back on the same card of the same round rather than starting again.

Every card tells the room what to do

There are five question formats, and each one carries its own instruction line, so the rules live on the card instead of in somebody's memory. This is the whole rulebook:

The card says	The room does
Most likely to	Point at someone. Loudest finger wins.
Never have I ever	Done it? Put a finger down.
Hot take	Pick a side and make your case.
Would you rather	No neither. Pick one and defend it.
Tell us	Everyone can answer. Passing is always fine.

Mixing formats is what keeps a round moving. A pointing card is loud and instant, a hot take turns into an argument, and a Would You Rather gives the person who has not spoken yet an easy way in. Decks are built as a mix on purpose, and each deck's info button tells you which formats dominate it before you commit a round to it.

The pass rule, and why it is built the way it is

There is a Pass button under every card, sitting beside Previous. Press it and the round moves on. That is the entire behaviour, and the absence of everything else is the point: no forfeit, no drink, no counter, no note of who passed or how often. A pass in Chinwag is identical to any other advance, right down to the code that handles it.

That is deliberate rather than an oversight. A pass that gets counted is a pass that gets judged, and the moment one pass looks expensive, everybody in the room silently recalculates what the next card might cost them. The quiet person stops taking swings, and a question game with no swings is just a list being read aloud. Honour a pass without comment and the group keeps taking risks.

Decks warm up. They do not open at full heat

New Friends, Party, Travel & Hostel and Spicy are each written in three stages, sorted by how much a card asks you to give away rather than by theme. Play one of those decks on its own and a twenty-card round deals seven cards from the first stage, seven from the second and six from the last, in that order, with the stage name shown next to the card counter.

1. 01Cool startLow cost to answerCards somebody who has met nobody in the room can still answer. New Friends calls this Break the Ice, Party calls it Doors Open.
2. 02Warming upThe material you picked the deck forThe middle stage is the deck doing its actual job. Warm Up in New Friends, Peak Party in Party, On the Road in Travel & Hostel.
3. 03Full heatNeeds a room that already trusts itselfThe bolder end, saved until last on purpose. Turn Up the Heat, After Midnight, Last Night of the Trip.

Two things worth knowing about that. The staging applies when one staged deck is playing alone; select several decks at once and the round shuffles across the whole mix instead, which is faster and more varied but loses the build. If you want the escalation, run a single deck for the first round and mix afterwards.

Rounds also prefer cards this phone has not dealt before. A card you have seen is held back for thirty days and then quietly becomes dealable again, so a deck fades rather than turning into a wall. When a selection is running low on unseen prompts, a line above the start button says so before you begin, rather than after the repeats start.

Family Mode, when someone in the room is under 18

Before the deck screen, Chinwag asks who is playing. Choose Family Mode and the app shows only two decks, Family and New Friends, with New Friends cut down to a reviewed mixed-age list of 55 of its 80 questions. Every adult, dating and Spicy deck is hidden, including one that was already selected before Family Mode went on.

Both decks are free in Family Mode and no upgrade prompt appears while it is on. Chinwag never asks for a birthday and never creates a child profile. Where iOS supports it, Apple can privately share an age range with the app; if that check is declined, fails, or comes back under 18, Chinwag falls back to Family Mode rather than opening the adult catalogue. An adult can turn Family Mode on or off in Settings, unless the age check required it for that session.

Nobody else needs the app, an account or a signal

The other players never download anything. There is no room code, no name entry and no profile, which means no dead minutes at the start while four people install a game the host already has.

The whole prompt catalogue lives on the phone once Chinwag is installed, so a round runs on a plane, in a hostel with hostile Wi-Fi, or in the corner of a pub with one bar of signal. Payment is the only part that needs a connection, and it goes through your Apple Account. The free New Friends deck keeps playing even when the store cannot be reached at all.

When the room goes flat

Every round has a card that lands wrong or a stretch where the energy dips. None of it needs a speech. In order of how often they work:

1. Ask why. The card is the setup and the follow-up is the payoff. Three people pointed at Dan, so ask Dan why. Roughly one card in four is about right, because every card kills the pace and none at all is just reading a list.
2. Switch to an opinion format. Hot takes and Would You Rather ask for a view about the world instead of a fact about the person, which is usually where a quiet player joins in first.
3. Cut the card the moment it misjudges the room. Tap straight past it. No apology, no workshopping. A host who visibly moves on teaches the group that no single card matters.
4. Change the mix rather than the game. Drop the deck that is not landing and add one that suits who actually turned up. The next round is dealt from the new selection immediately.
5. Stop while it is still good. When a card lands so well that people are still arguing about it two cards later, that is the ending. Press End round mid-momentum and the group will ask to play again later, which is the only review worth having.

There is a longer version of this, written for the person holding the phone, in how to host a question game people actually enjoy. If you would rather see the questions first, the free New Friends deck is the one the three-stage build was designed on.