The cooperative Christmas party game that’s heartfelt, hilarious, and a little off‑key.

Three to ten. Each round two players guess together and everyone else is the group; at three there is one guesser. A big group makes the singing better, because everyone sings at once.

Nope, and you are not doing it alone. On a Carol turn everybody sings at the same time, which is excellent cover. This game is not about skill: you can be Beyonce or you can be a rabid raccoon, enthusiasm beats pitch every time. Every Carol card has a QR code with links to lyrics and music, and you only need about a minute of it.

No, this isn't that kind of game. Nobody is judged on their performance. The only thing anyone decides is whether the guessers got close enough to the Challenge card, and the group works that out together. A struggling group naturally gets generous and a cruising group gets strict, which is exactly how it should go.

You all do, together, or nobody does. You are all on the same side, decorating one Christmas tree as a star moves along an advent calendar. Hang twelve ornaments on it by Christmas Eve and you win: the star goes on top. Finish short and there is no star this year. Nobody is scored and nobody is ranked.

Ornaments fall off the tree, and that is meant to be funny rather than punishing. Chaos cards come out on the 6th, 12th and 18th and stack up for the rest of the game, and any player can call out any other player at any moment. The broken ornaments land under the tree and keep the story of what knocked them off.

Yup. Designed for exactly the mix of people who show up at Christmas.

You choose your Christmas before you start. Dasher, A Quick Christmas, moves the star three days a round and takes about twenty minutes. Prancer takes about thirty and Rudolph, The Most Christmas, about an hour. Whichever you pick you are after the same twelve ornaments, because a shorter Christmas hangs more of them per correct guess. The free demo plays Dasher.

Yep! The digital demo is free to play at truthorcarol.com/play. You don't have to download anything or create an account. Open it on your phone or laptop and send all the other players to the same place, and tell them to join your game with a code you get. If you want to play it with other players using the digital game, you can do that, and if you just want to try it out and learn to play, you can do that too.

Working on it! Join our email list for updates.

English and German are most likely to be the first languages. Tell me if you're interested in having the game in another language!