RELAY NOVEL
Relay Novel
Everyone writes at once as books rotate around — an improvised relay novel, playable in your browser
Players
2–50 players
Play Time
15min-
Everyone writes at once as books rotate around — an improvised relay novel, playable in your browser
Create a room and send the room code or the link to your friends. One phone or computer each — works on a call or face to face.
Join with a room code
Free, no sign-up. 2 to 50 players. This is a browser-first release — it is not in the app yet.
Relay Novel is an improv writing game where the same number of storybooks as players run at once. In round 1, everyone writes their own book's title (up to 30 characters) and first page (up to 200 characters). From round 2 on, books get reshuffled to a new writer each round, and everyone writes the next page at the same time. Choose a total page count from 5–20 (default 8), a pass order — In Order, Random, or Random with Repeats — and how much each writer can see: only the previous page (default) or every page so far. Once every book is finished, everyone reads all the books without knowing who wrote what, and casts one vote for a favorite. Each player's score is the sum of (pages they wrote in a book × that book's votes); only the results screen reveals who wrote each page. This is dokopa's first browser-first game — no install, no app required, play instantly in your browser (it isn't in the app yet). Taking turns to add to a shared piece of writing is an old idea in Japan too — dokopa also has Yomibito-Shirazu, where a poem is passed around one character at a time to build a haiku.
In round 1, everyone gets their own book and writes its title (up to 30 characters) and first page (up to 200 characters) at the same time.
From round 2 on, books are reshuffled every round. Everyone writes the next page (up to 200 characters) of whichever book they're handed — all at the same time. By default you can only see the previous page, so the story keeps taking wild turns. Miss the time limit (180 seconds by default) and your draft is auto-submitted. This repeats until the book reaches its target page count (8 by default).
Once every book is finished, everyone reads all of them without knowing who wrote what. Cast your one vote for your favorite book — you can even vote for a book you helped write.
Each book's vote count is revealed, and players are ranked by score (pages they wrote × that book's votes, summed up). This is the moment each page's author is finally revealed.
Highest total score wins — score = sum across all books of (pages you wrote in that book × that book's votes)
Switch page visibility to "all pages so far" if you want writers to plant foreshadowing on purpose; the default ("only the previous page") tends to produce wilder, harder-to-predict turns.
Set the pass order to Random or Random with Repeats and the same book can land in different hands every round, making the story even harder to predict.
You can vote for a book you helped write — since almost everyone touches almost every book, just vote honestly for whichever one you liked best.
The host can freely tune all four settings — fewer pages for a big group, a longer time limit if everyone wants to write more carefully.
Unusually for a word game, there are no drawings and no prompts — pages are joined by prose alone. Echo the previous page's turn of phrase a little and the finished book reads as if one person wrote all of it.
Games in which several people take turns continuing the same piece of writing go back to "Consequences", played with nothing but paper and pen in 19th-century Britain. You folded the paper so only the part just before yours was visible, then passed it to the next person.
In the 1920s the French Surrealists adopted it as a creative method and called it "Cadavre exquis" — the "Exquisite Corpse" in English. The name is said to come from a sentence the game itself happened to produce: "The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine."
The same game has carried on under different names all over the world. In 1931 the Detection Club in Britain published The Floating Admiral, a mystery novel in which 14 writers — Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton and others — each wrote one chapter. In English, continuing the same piece in turn like this is called a round-robin story or a chain novel. In the United States, Mad Libs was devised in 1953: players supply words without being told the context, and the finished text is read aloud at the end. It is still a party staple today.
Japan has its own tradition of renku and renshi — linked verse, where several people add one stanza after another in a shared sitting. Yomibito-Shirazu, also on dokopa, belongs to that lineage: a poem is passed around one character at a time to build a haiku.
dokopa's Relay Novel takes these long-standing games and makes them playable on a screen today.
Relay Novel is a browser-first release. No install needed — create a room on this page and start playing.
It is not in the Dokopa app yet.
