Truth or Dare

280 truths and dares in four packs. Every dare is one you can do from where you are sitting.

Tap to choose which packs to play with

70 truths and dares in play

Truth or dare? Whoever is up decides.

T for truth, D for dare, space to be told

Turns a round

How to play

  1. 1Choose your packs. Friends is on to start with; add Family if there are children in the room, or switch to Couples for two people.
  2. 2Sit in a circle with one phone. Whoever is up says truth or dare out loud, then taps it.
  3. 3The card is dealt. Answer it honestly, or do the dare while everyone watches.
  4. 4Stuck between the two? Let the phone pick tosses a fair coin for you.
  5. 5Pass the phone on. After ten turns the round ends and the split of truths to dares is on the screen.

The trick to playing it well

Truth or Dare fails in exactly one way, and it is so common that most people think it is just what the game is: after about six turns, everybody is picking truth. The game quietly turns into a questionnaire, somebody says “shall we do something else”, and that is the evening. It’s worth understanding why. The usual diagnosis is that the group is boring, or too shy. That is wrong, and it sends you looking for the wrong fix.

A truth costs eight seconds on the sofa. A dare costs standing up in front of your friends. Those are not remotely the same price, so the first person to take the cheap option is being sensible rather than cowardly. The problem is what happens next: once two people in a row have taken a truth, the third looks like a show-off for doing anything else. Nobody wants to be the person visibly enjoying themselves more than the room. That is social, not personal, and it means the game is usually decided in the first two turns.

So the fix is at the start rather than in the middle. Whoever goes first takes a dare. Pick somebody who genuinely does not mind, and pick them before you begin rather than waiting for a volunteer. One person doing something daft in the first thirty seconds sets the price of a dare for the entire game, because now taking one is normal instead of conspicuous. Watch what a group does after that opening and you will see the ratio hold for another twenty turns. This page counts truths against dares and says something about the split at the end of each round for exactly this reason: it is the number that tells you whether the game is working.

The house rule worth adopting: the person asking never chooses the dare. This is the real flaw in the version everybody grew up with. When the dare comes from whoever is asking, it is never impartial. It gets aimed. The person who suggests it knows exactly which one will land hardest on the person taking it, and about a third of the time that is why they suggested it. Drawing removes the choice from the room entirely, which is the whole reason to use anything other than your own imaginations. Note that scrolling a list on a phone does not fix it: you still pick which one to read out, and you still pick it while looking at the person who has to do it.

Agree the pass before anybody needs it. One pass each, no explanation required, and nobody comments on it when it is used. Timing matters more than the rule. If you have to ask for an exit while eleven people watch, that is the exact thing an exit was meant to spare you. A pass invented the moment someone needs it is not really a pass. Groups that go without one entirely always end up in the same place: one person quietly cornered, everybody else aware of it, and the game over in spirit ten minutes before it ends.

Stop while it is still good. Truth or Dare has no natural ending, which is why it so often runs until it goes flat or until a dare goes somewhere nobody wanted. The best moment to stop is immediately after the best dare of the night, while the room is still repeating it. That is also why this version is cut into rounds of ten rather than left open. An ending you can choose to ignore is easier to take than one you have to invent while everyone is still going.

One last thing about the dares themselves, because it is the mistake every printed list makes. A dare that sends somebody out of the room is not a dare, it is an errand. Knock on a neighbour’s door, run to the shop, phone somebody who is not playing. Each of those stops the game for five minutes, drags in a person who never agreed to be part of it, and cannot be watched, which was the entire point. Half the room checks their phones while they wait and the game never really restarts. Everything in this bank happens in front of the people playing, in about a minute.

What is deliberately not here

Search for truth or dare and roughly half of what comes back is the adult version. It is a real thing that plenty of people want, and it is not on this page.

The reason is not squeamishness, it is that a chip on a page is not an age gate. This site is opened by families at Christmas, by classrooms, and by people who found it looking for something to do on a Tuesday, and none of them tapped anything to say who was in the room. Content that needs a gate needs a real one: a separate section, behind a check. Until that exists, the honest thing is to hold one kind of content here so you always know what a card is going to say before you hand the phone to somebody’s mother.

The same reasoning covers drinking dares, which are absent for a second reason as well: a drinking game needs to know things about the room that a web page cannot know. If your group plays that way it will take you about four seconds to add the rule yourselves, and it is a much better decision when a person in the room makes it.

And there is no office pack. That one is worth saying plainly, because the rest of this site leans hard toward workplace content: Truth or Dare at work is a bad idea in a way that is structural rather than fixable. The dare is chosen for you, there is a power difference sitting in the room whether anyone acknowledges it or not, and the person who did not want to play gets told afterwards that it was only a game. If you need something for a team, the question banks on office party games do the same job of getting a group to find out about each other, with none of that attached.

Which pack for which room

Packs stack, so a mixed room can play Family and New group together. The difference between them is not how daring they are. It is what they assume about the people playing.

  • 🎉 Friends

    35 truths and 35 dares. The standard version, for a group that knows each other

  • 👪 Family

    35 truths and 35 dares. Clean, and safe with children in the room

  • 💜 Couples

    35 truths and 35 dares. Read these to each other. See the note below

  • 👋 New group

    35 truths and 35 dares. For a room where people have only just met

Friends assumes shared history, which is what makes it the best of the four with people who have known each other a while. Half its truths are only interesting because the room can already guess the answer. Hand the same pack to a group that met an hour ago and most of it lands as an interview.

New group exists for exactly that room. Nothing in it refers to anything that happened before tonight, and its dares are the low-exposure kind: teach the room a word, name everybody without help, say three things about yourself and let people work out which one is invented. The point of a dare with strangers is to give somebody a reason to talk, not to test their nerve.

Couples is the one built differently, and it is worth knowing before you start: you read these to each other. The cards say “me” and “we” because a two-person game where you read your own question off a screen and then answer it is not a game, it is a form. Hand the phone to your partner, let them ask, and answer them rather than the phone.

Family is the pack most sites get wrong, because the instinct is to write the friends pack with the rude bits taken out. What actually changes with children in the room is the direction of the embarrassment: an adult finds it funny to be mildly humiliated in front of people who love them, and a child does not. So the dares here are physical and daft: be a teapot, walk like a crab, hold a plank. The truths are about things that happened rather than about how anybody feels.

Common questions

How do you play Truth or Dare?
Sit in a circle and pass one phone round. Whoever has it says truth or dare, taps that button, and the phone deals them something. They answer it honestly or do it, then the phone goes to the next person. That is the whole game. The only thing worth agreeing before you start is what happens when somebody wants to pass.
What do we do if somebody refuses?
Give everybody one pass for the whole game and say so before the first turn, rather than inventing the rule the moment somebody needs it. A pass is taken without explanation and without anybody commenting on it. Groups that skip this end up cornering one person, and that is the point at which the game stops being fun for everyone else too, not just for them.
Is it suitable for children?
Use the Family pack, which is written for a room with children in it: nothing that needs anything from outside the room, nothing that could hurt, and no question a nine-year-old would have to dodge. The dares in it are physical and silly rather than embarrassing, which is the right way round at that age.
Can two people play?
Yes, and the Couples pack is written for exactly that. It works differently from the others: the cards are phrased to be read out by the other person, so you ask each other rather than reading your own question off a screen. With two players you also drop the circle entirely and simply alternate.
Are there spicy or 18+ dares?
No, and it is deliberate rather than an oversight. Everything here is safe for a room with a grandparent and a nine-year-old in it. The adult version is a real thing that people genuinely want, but it needs an age gate to sit behind, and a chip on a page that families open is not one. Until that exists, this page holds one kind of content and you always know which.
Can we play Truth or Dare at work?
We would not recommend it, and there is no office pack for that reason. A dare is chosen for you rather than by you, a workplace has a power difference sitting in the room, and "it was only a game" is exactly what somebody who did not want to play gets told afterwards. For a team, the office question banks on the Office Party Games page do the same job with none of that.
How is this different from the Truth or Dare wheel?
The wheel decides which of the two you are taking and hands you nothing else. This page holds the actual truths and dares and deals them one at a time, with no repeats. Plenty of groups use both: spin for the category if you like watching it happen, then take the card. There is a Let the phone pick button here that does the same job in one tap.
Do we need anything to play?
One phone, and that is the constraint every dare in the bank was written against. Nothing here asks you to leave the room, buy anything, message somebody who is not playing, or make a mess that has to be cleared up afterwards. If a dare cannot be done from where you are sitting in about a minute, it did not go in.

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