This page collects the questions that come up most often when a new group sits down to play Shadow Council for the first time. If your question isn't answered here, the full rules live on the How to Play page, and tactical questions are covered in the Strategy guide.
Four is the minimum, because two of those four are the Evil pair and a two-against-two game leaves almost no room for deduction. The game gets noticeably better from six players upward, and it scales comfortably to a dozen or more. The larger the group, the harder it is for the Evil pair to find each other without being noticed — which is exactly where the tension lives.
No. Shadow Council runs entirely in a phone's web browser. The host opens the site, taps Host, and shares a four-digit code. Everyone else opens the same site and joins with that code. There is no app store, no account, and no sign-up — players choose only a display name that lasts for the single game.
If you expect a long session — and Shadow Council is designed to run across a whole dinner — it helps. Adding the page to your home screen lets the game survive your phone locking or you switching to another app, which a normal browser tab sometimes won't. On iPhone, tap the Share icon in Safari and choose "Add to Home Screen." On Android, Chrome will offer an "Install" button on the start screen.
No, and this is the heart of the game. You are shown your own secret word and your partner's word, but not their identity. Your job is to work out which of the other players is holding that second word, purely by listening for it surfacing in conversation. Finding each other is half of winning.
Deliberately not. Once you tap past the role reveal, your word is gone from your screen for the rest of the game. This is a design choice, not a missing feature: players sit close enough to glimpse each other's phones, and a word sitting on screen mid-game would be a tell. You're meant to hold it in your head.
For the same reason. Every screen in Shadow Council looks visually identical regardless of role — no red for Evil, no green for Good. A neighbour catching a glimpse of your phone should learn nothing from the colours. It's a quiet but important part of keeping the game fair at a crowded table.
A tie does not eliminate everyone tied. At the start of each round a random player is named the Arbiter, shown openly to the whole table. If the vote ends level between two or more players, the Arbiter chooses which one of them goes. In the final round the Arbiter is drawn from the already-eliminated players, so neither of the last two decides their own fate. It's role-neutral, so holding the Arbiter never reveals whether you're Good or Evil.
In the final round, when only two players remain, everyone votes — including those already eliminated. Without this, a final two-player vote would be a meaningless one-against-one. Letting the whole table weigh in keeps the most important decision of the game in everyone's hands.
No, by design. The host decides when enough has been said and opens voting. Because the game is meant to sit alongside a real conversation, a countdown would force an artificial pace. The table sets the rhythm.
English and Swedish. The host picks one when creating the game, and it applies to every player in that game — both Evil players must always draw from the same list. The Swedish set leans toward everyday, conversational words, including some distinctly Swedish pairs, so non-native English speakers can slip their word into talk just as naturally.
It's avoided. Each language keeps a memory of recently used pairs and steers away from repeating them across consecutive games, so a session of several rounds stays fresh.
Almost always a phone went to sleep or a tab was backgrounded and briefly lost its connection. The game state lives in a shared database, so when the phone wakes the screen catches back up to where everyone else is. Adding the game to your home screen, as above, makes this far less likely during long sessions.
Only a display name, held for the duration of one game and tied to no account or identity. The full detail is in the Privacy Policy.
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