A collaborative writing game for classrooms, built on the Surrealists' Exquisite Corpse. Free. No accounts. No installs. Nothing collected about your students.
Host a storyOpens the game with Group mode selected. Takes about a minute to set up.
Every student opens strangerstories.app on a laptop or phone. You pick a world, write the opening line, and a six-character code appears on your screen. Put it on the board. Students type the code, and the story is on every screen. Each student reads the last line and writes the next one. When it feels done, you end it from your screen, and the whole class sees the finished story at the same moment.
It works with five students or forty. It works on the first day of school when nobody knows anyone, which is the point: nobody's name is attached to anything.
Everyone sees the whole story as it grows. Fifteen minutes, then end it and read it aloud. It will be coherent. It will also be a little cautious, because everyone was writing for the room.
Same setup, new code, but now each writer sees only the last two sentences. Nobody sees the story until you call it. Read this one aloud too. It will take stranger turns. Then ask the class which one was better writing, and why. That argument is the lesson.
The second round is the original 1925 game. Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and their friends folded a sheet of paper so each person could see only the edge of what came before. The constraint killed self-consciousness. Your students will feel it work in real time.
There are 22 worlds, each a tone rather than a plot. Threshold (doorways, the moment before) for a unit on rites of passage. Letters Never Sent for epistolary form. The Confessional for first person. Versailles for dramatic irony. The Agora for rhetoric. Static for fragment and voice. Every world comes with seed lines if you'd rather not write the opener yourself.
Chain and Paired modes keep running after class. A student who writes a line in a public chain can check back tomorrow and find a stranger has picked it up. That's the homework that doesn't feel like homework.
I never did like arithmetic... perhaps because I'm always counting on my fingers.
The dentist said my teeth were fine but my gums were written in a dialect he couldn't read.
And when I downloaded the translation software, it turned out to be in Klingon... where was Captain Kirk when I needed him? I pulled out my transponder before the dentist got grabby with his pincers.
Written by strangers in Fever Dream. None of them could see what came before.
No sign-up. No email. No names. The site remembers a browser, not a person, so a student can find their stories again on the same laptop. Nothing is sold, tracked, or shown to advertisers. There is no AI writing any of it. The only thing on the server is the sentences.
I'm Justin Neuman. I teach literature at Eugene Lang College at The New School, and before that at Yale and Phillips Exeter. I run Stranger Stories in my own seminars. The best sessions I've ever taught follow the logic of improv: someone notices something strange, someone else picks it up, and the room ends up thinking a thought nobody walked in with. This game is that, with the training wheels off.
I write about play as a serious thing. The argument that free, pointless, unscored play is where we're most human, and that our platforms have mostly captured it, is in my essay for Aeon, published this week. Stranger Stories is my attempt to build something that runs the other way: no score, no winner, no feed. Just a sentence and whoever's next.
Questions, or a story your class wrote that you'd like featured here: [email protected]
