Support Centre

Getting the stage onto a television

The host view is an ordinary web page at /host?code=XXXX. Anything that can put a web page on a TV works:

• HDMI — laptop into the TV. The most reliable option, and the only one with no wireless audio delay.
• AirPlay / Chromecast — mirror the browser tab from a Mac, iPhone or iPad. Works well; expect a fraction of a second of audio lag, which does not affect buzzing (see Buzzing & fairness).
• The TV's own browser — if your smart TV has one, point it at gptpg.ai/host?code=XXXX. Text entry on TV remotes is miserable, so create the room on a phone or laptop first and just open the host URL.
• Apple TV — today, AirPlay the browser tab. There is a native tvOS host app in development; see Apple TV, iPhone & Watch.

The host screen went blank or stopped updating

Reload the page. The host view reconnects and asks the server for a full state snapshot, so it repaints itself wherever the game currently is — you will not lose the round. You will have to tap 🔊 Enable voice again, because that permission resets with the page.

If the screen is a TV browser or a mirrored tab that sleeps, disable the screen saver for game night. A sleeping tab has its timers throttled by the browser, which makes the host view look frozen even when the game is fine.

My phone says “disconnected — retrying in Ns”

Do nothing. The phone reconnects by itself. The retry delay starts under a second and grows each attempt up to a ceiling of roughly twenty seconds, and every delay is randomly jittered — that is on purpose, so eight phones coming back after the same outage don't all hit the server on the same tick.

When it reconnects it presents a rejoin token saved in your browser and takes the same seat back, with your score intact. Mid-game, a disconnected player stays on the board, greyed out, until they return.

• If you disconnect during the lobby — before the game starts — your seat is removed. Just join again.
• If you disconnect while it is your turn to answer, the turn resolves as a miss so the game can carry on. Nothing else is lost.
• If it is still retrying after a minute, check the phone actually has internet, then reload the page.

“This seat was opened on another device/tab”

This is the seat rule working as designed. One live connection per player, always — the newest connection wins. Something else opened your seat, so this device was let go on purpose and will not reconnect (reconnecting would start a fight neither device could win).

Usual culprits:

• The same room open in a second tab or a second browser on the same phone.
• Somebody handed you their phone and you rejoined on yours.
• You took the buzzer on the Apple Watch — that is meant to replace the phone, so your points stay on one seat instead of splitting across two.

Fix: close the extra tab and reload the page on the device you actually want to play on. It will reclaim the seat, and whatever it displaced gets this same message.

I'm on the board twice / I lost my score and came back as a new player

The rejoin token lives in your browser's local storage for the room you joined. You get a fresh seat — starting from zero — whenever that token isn't there to present:

• You joined from a different browser, a private/incognito window, or a different phone.
• Browser data or site data got cleared between rounds.
• Somebody typed the code on a second device "to check something".

Seats are never handed out on a guess: a wrong or made-up token is refused and the connection joins as a brand-new player instead. Nobody can steal your points by fiddling with a link.

Fix during a game: the ghost seat greys out and stops mattering. If it is annoying on the board, finish the round and start the next game — the roster is per room.

Everyone dropped at once

That is the server restarting (a deploy, or the host provider cycling the process). Every phone reconnects on its own jittered backoff and reclaims its seat. If the room itself was lost, the code stops working and you'll see “session ended” — start a new room; the finished game's record is still on the server.

Does my phone need to stay awake?

Keep the play page in the foreground and the phone unlocked while you're playing. The connection survives a locked screen better than you'd expect — the server pings every 25 seconds specifically to stop idle connections being culled, and it keeps working even when the browser throttles background timers — but a phone that has been asleep may take a moment to catch up, and your buzzer arms from your own clock, so a throttled tab can arm late.

The TV is completely silent

Work down this list — it is ordered by how often each one is the answer:

1. Tap 🔊 Enable voice on the host screen. Browsers block audio and speech until a real human taps something on the page. Until you do, the host is mute and the game carries on in captions. The button flips to 🔇 Mute voice once it's armed.
2. The tab is muted. Desktop browsers let you mute a single tab, and it is easy to do by accident. Check for the crossed-out speaker on the tab.
3. Volume / output routing. If you're mirroring to a TV, confirm the audio is going to the TV rather than the laptop speakers.
4. You reloaded the page. The audio permission resets on every load. Tap the voice button again.
5. Voice was switched off at setup. There is a host-voice toggle on the game setup screen. If it was off, this room has no voice at all — captions only. Start a new room with it on.

The host's voice sounds robotic, or different from last time

There is a deliberate three-step fallback, and a room can move down it mid-game without stopping:

1. Studio voice — audio rendered on the server and sent to the screen. This is the good one, and it needs the server to have a voice provider configured.
2. Browser voice — your browser's own built-in speech synthesis. Always available, sounds like your operating system, and varies wildly between a Mac, a Windows laptop and a smart TV. This is what you hear if the studio voice isn't configured, times out, or a clip fails to play.
3. Silent captions — the line still appears on screen. The game never waits for audio.

So: robotic almost always means step 2. Nothing is broken; the room is just reading its own lines. Different screens will sound different, because the browser voice comes from the device.

The host talks over itself, or lines arrive out of order

Lines are queued and played strictly in the order they were written, and the game waits for the room to finish talking before moving to the next beat. If lines are overlapping, you almost certainly have two host screens open on the same room — a laptop and a TV browser, or two tabs. Close one.

Can I change the host's personality?

Yes, at setup: Ace (warm, classic game-show), Sage (deadpan and unimpressed) or Volt (chaotic hype). It changes the writing, the voice, and — in Hot Takes — what the judge actually rewards: Ace rewards heart, Sage rewards wit, Volt rewards chaos. Pick your judge deliberately.

“I definitely pressed first”

Almost certainly you did, and you probably still won. Buzz order is not decided by whose packet reached the server first — that would just crown whoever has the best wi-fi. Every buzz carries the time your own phone registered the press, and the server sorts those press times after correcting for each phone's clock.

The correction comes from a handshake that runs the moment you connect: your phone trades five quick timing pings with the server, keeps the fastest one as the most trustworthy sample, and re-runs the whole measurement every twenty seconds because phone clocks drift. Your buzzer also arms locally at the moment the window opens on your own corrected clock — never early, and never held back waiting for a message to arrive.

Checking whether buzzing is actually fair in this room

Every room publishes its own clock evidence. With the room live, open:

gptpg.ai/api/sessions/XXXX/telemetry

You get one entry per player. The numbers that matter:

If one player's numbers are dramatically worse than everyone else's, that is a phone problem (bad wi-fi corner, aggressive battery saver, backgrounded tab), not a game problem.

Buzzing feels laggy on one phone

• Keep the play page in the foreground. Backgrounded tabs get their timers throttled by the phone, which delays when the buzzer arms.
• Turn off low-power mode — it throttles timers too.
• Get onto the same wi-fi as everyone else if you can. It isn't required for fairness, but a stable connection keeps the clock measurement clean.
• Being on cellular while everyone else is on wi-fi is fine. Being on cellular in a basement with one bar is not.

Somebody buzzed, got it wrong, and it passed to the next person

That's the default. Buzzes form a queue, not a lockout: a wrong answer passes the turn to whoever buzzed next. If the queue empties, the buzzer reopens for everyone who hasn't already tried.

The host marked a right answer wrong

Answers are checked in escalating steps: exact match, then known accepted variants, then a normalized comparison (case, punctuation, a leading "the"), then a close-enough-spelling check. Anything past that is a judgement call, and what happens next is a setting you choose at setup:

• Auto-reject (default) — the borderline answer is marked wrong and the game moves on.
• Host discretion — the game pauses and the host screen shows accept/reject buttons. Only the host screen can do this; players can't override their own verdicts.

If host discretion is chosen but no host screen is attached, it falls back to auto-reject rather than stranding the room waiting for a decision nobody can make. Rooms using a custom pack turn host discretion on by default, because AI-written facts deserve a court of appeal.

“Not enough players”

Each game has a real minimum, because some of them are structurally broken below it. AI players count towards the minimum.

Short a body? Seat an AI player.

The start button does nothing

• Start comes from the host screen. If you're looking at a phone, that's why.
• Check the roster on the TV. If a phone shows "connected" but isn't on the board, it typed a different code — the codes avoid look-alike characters for exactly this reason, but people still read the QR wrong. Have them re-enter it.
• If the room is already past the lobby you can't restart it. Finish or start a new room.

“Session full”

Rooms cap at 12 players by default. AI players occupy seats too — drop a bot to make room for a human.

“Session ended” / the code stopped working

A room ends in one of two ways:

• The four-hour cap. Every room is hard-limited to four hours from the moment it was created, no matter what is happening in it. Long game nights should expect to start a fresh room at some point — it takes ten seconds and the code changes.
• The clean-up sweep. Once a game has finished and every human has closed their page, the room is retired within about a minute. AI players do not keep a room alive on their own.

The Rejoin chips on Game Home are shortcuts to rooms this browser has been in. They keep working until the room is gone; after that the page will tell you the session ended rather than pretending.

Settling an argument about a game that already ended

Every room writes an ordered record of everything that happened, and it outlives the room. If you have the session id, gptpg.ai/api/logs/<session-id>/digest returns the moments that settle arguments — who buzzed, when they pressed, who was granted the turn, every verdict, every reveal. It is raw JSON, not a pretty page; it is for when somebody really will not let it go.

Can I pause a game?

Not as a feature. The game advances on its own timers — nobody's phone can advance it, and there is no pause button. In practice: let a round finish, then leave the room sitting in place. The four-hour cap is the only deadline.

There's no microphone button on my phone

The mic button only appears if your browser actually supports speech recognition — the page checks before drawing it, rather than showing you a button that does nothing. Support varies by browser and by version; recent Safari on iOS and Chrome generally have it, and some browsers do not. If there's no button, type your answer. Nothing else is affected.

The mic button is there but nothing gets transcribed

• Grant microphone permission. The first tap triggers the browser's permission prompt; if you dismissed it, re-enable the site's microphone access in browser settings and reload.
• Speech recognition needs the internet on most browsers — it isn't all done on the phone.
• Tap 🎤, speak, then tap again (or just pause) to stop. Whatever it heard drops into the answer box; you can edit it before submitting.
• In a loud room, the TV's own voice is competing with you. Wait for the host to finish, or type.

Does GPTPG listen to my microphone during a game?

No. Nothing listens on its own. The mic only opens when you tap the microphone button, and it closes when you stop. The transcription is done by your browser, and what reaches the server is the same text you would have typed.

The picture isn't showing on my phone

It isn't supposed to. In the picture games the image is on the TV only and your phone is the betting slip — in Zoomed In it shows you the points ticking down while the picture pulls back. If nobody in the room can see a picture, the problem is the host screen, not the phones.

Real or AI images won't load

Those images are served from GPTPG itself, so a broken image usually means the host screen's connection dropped mid-load. Reload the host page — it will resync to the current round.

Name That Tune plays no melody

The melody is generated by the host screen itself, using the same audio permission the voice uses. Tap 🔊 Enable voice before you start and the tunes work. If you armed audio after the round began, the current melody may stay silent — the next one will play.

On a mirrored screen (AirPlay/Chromecast), audio arrives a beat behind the picture. That does not affect scoring — buzz timing is measured on your phone, not on the TV.

When does it reset?

Midnight UTC, everywhere, no exceptions. Depending on where you live that may be the middle of your afternoon. Your unfinished run for the day is remembered by your browser and expires at the same rollover.

How do I actually play one?

Press Play today's… and you get a private room. The puzzle itself — the picture, the melody — happens on a screen, so open the TV link on any screen you have (even a second browser tab) and use your phone as the buzzer. Phone-only works too: you get the points ticker instead of the picture. When you're done, press 🏁 I finished — submit my score.

My score didn't submit / the leaderboard doesn't show me

• Set a leaderboard name first, at the top of the page. Submitting without one is refused.
• Names are the identity — one entry per name per game per day, and only your best score counts. Replaying can improve your score, never damage it.
• Because the name is the only identity on the daily board, somebody else can take the name you use. An account does not reserve a leaderboard name — it records your own scores on your dashboard from the day you signed in.
• Impossible scores are rejected outright — the maximum for a daily is 2,500.

How it works

• Create one and you get a code like C-BSMNT. Everyone joins once, by name.
• Attach a game night to the circle at setup and that night counts.
• Standings are night wins, not points. Winning by 2,000 and winning by 4 are both one night.
• A season is first to five night wins. Reaching it crowns a champion, writes a permanent champion note, and rolls into a new season.
• Only circle members are counted in standings. A guest can win the room but not the campaign.

Who can see my circle?

Anyone with the code. Knowing the code is membership — it works exactly like a room code. There is no directory, no search and no browsing, but there is also no password: don't share the code outside the basement. Circle creation is rate-limited to five new circles per hour from one connection.

What does “what the host knows” mean, and how do I delete it?

After a night ends — never during — a small process reads that game's record and writes typed notes: a win streak, a rivalry decided by a sliver, a category you went cold on, a season championship. Every note is visible on the circle page, and every note has a FORGET THIS button.

Forgetting is a real, immediate, permanent delete: the note is gone from the database and the host simply never mentions it again. Notes that stop being refreshed also age out on their own after about two months; championship notes are kept.

How it works

1. Describe what you want — topic, occasion, difficulty. "80s movies for my dad's 60th, medium-hard" is a good brief.
2. The studio writes the entries, then checks them.
3. You get a six-character pack code. Anyone can host with it — paste it into the pack field on the game setup screen.

Supported formats today: Trivia, Brainstorm, Hot Takes, Vibe Check and Chain Reaction. Packs run 5 to 30 entries; asking for more is clamped down.

Why did I get fewer questions than I asked for?

Because the studio only ships what survived checking, and it says so. Entries are quarantined — shown to you, with the reason, and left out of the pack — when they are malformed, duplicated, have an answer too long to buzz, or, for trivia, when a separate fact-checking pass isn't certain the answer is right. Ambiguous, disputed and time-dependent facts get thrown out on purpose. An honest small pack beats a confident wrong one.

The build failed

• “Only N entries survived” — fewer than five made it through. Broaden the topic; very narrow briefs produce duplicates and shaky facts.
• “The fact-checker is unavailable” — the checking pass didn't answer, so the build is failed deliberately rather than shipping unchecked facts. Try again shortly.
• “The writer came back empty” — rephrase the topic.
• Rate limited — three successful packs per hour per connection, plus a looser cap on attempts. Failed builds don't count against your successes.

Is the pack correct?

It is AI-written and AI-checked, which is not the same as verified by a human. That is precisely why rooms using a custom trivia pack turn host discretion on by default — the host screen gets accept/reject buttons on borderline calls. If you find a wrong answer, overrule it and move on.

Who else can use my pack? Can I delete it?

Anyone who has the code, exactly like a room code — the pack is unlisted but not private. Your brief is stored alongside the pack. There is no self-service delete today; if you need a pack removed, see Contact.

How it works in a car

• Plug one phone into the car — CarPlay, Bluetooth, aux, doesn't matter — and tap once to start the audio. Nothing appears on the CarPlay screen. It behaves like a podcast: audio only, by design.
• There are no buzz races. The host names one person per question, in rotation. Nobody is racing anybody at speed.
• Answer windows are much longer than usual, and the driver always gets extra time. The lightning round doesn't exist in the car at all.
• A driver's window that lapses is not punished with drama. The game waits for the road, never the other way round.

Which games work in the car?

Trivia, Name That Tune and Interrogation. That's the whole list, and it's a promise rather than a backlog: a game earns a car seat by being playable with ears and a voice. Games built on a shared screen or on everyone typing are not offered in car mode.

How does the driver answer?

By voice, or with the steering wheel's media button. The driver's touch presses are refused by the server on purpose — mic and wheel only. Hand the driver seat to somebody else at the gas stop and the game reassigns it.

What does “Adult” actually change?

It is a register set per room, chosen at setup. On All ages, content marked adult is filtered out of the question bank and the host's writing stays clean. On Adult you get a grown-up party game: profanity, crude and morbid humor, drinking and dating and bodily-function material, risqué innuendo — and a host with a sharper vocabulary. Pack Studio and the AI judge follow the same setting.

What it never includes, in either mode: sexual content involving minors, sexual explicitness beyond innuendo, targeted hate or slurs, harassment of real named people, or anything instructing self-harm. Those are out of scope for GPTPG, not adult-only.

Why did it ask me to confirm?

Because adult mode is a decision about the people in your room. Switching it on asks you to confirm one line — everyone here is 18+ and okay with this — and that's the whole gate. No birthday, no form. Loading a pack that is itself rated adult upgrades the room, so it asks the same question.

Signed in? You confirm once and we remember it, so you're not re-confirming every Friday. You can withdraw it any time from your account, and the next adult room will ask again.

Not every game has adult content

Some games ship no adult-rated material at all yet. If you pick Adult for one of those, the setup screen says so — the questions won't change, though your host's lines still get sharper. We'd rather tell you than imply a change that isn't there.

Playing with AI players

Seat up to three at setup: Chip 🤖 buzzes fast and flails, Vera 🟣 waits and wins, Mo 🎰 bets it all. They take real seats, count towards the minimum player requirement, occupy one of the twelve slots, and heckle.

They are available in Trivia, Zoomed In, Name That Tune, Bluff City, Hot Takes and Brainstorm. Games built on shared images or on holding a secret don't offer them yet. An empty room full of only bots does not stay open — human connections keep a room alive.

Teams

Switch teams on at setup and the room splits into Coral and Teal. Players are assigned alternately as they join, and anybody can switch sides in the lobby — once the game starts, teams are locked. Missed questions can open a steal for the other team at half points.

Why does taking the buzzer on the Watch kick my phone off?

Because the watch replaces the phone as your seat rather than joining as a second player. If it joined separately, your buzzes would score for a different name and split your points in half. One live connection per seat, always — so the phone is let go with the "seat opened on another device" message described in Disconnects & seats. That is expected behaviour, not a bug.

I forgot my password

• Go to /reset and type the address on the account. If it is one we know, a link goes to that inbox.
• We won't tell you whether that address has an account. The answer is the same either way, on purpose — otherwise anyone could check who has signed up here by typing addresses in.
• The link works once and expires in 45 minutes. Asking again invalidates the older link, so always use the newest email.
• Using it signs you out on every device. That is deliberate: if someone else got into the account, this is how they get shown the door.
• Nothing in the email? Check spam first. Then check the address for a typo — if the account is under a different address, no link was sent and none will be.

What is the tick next to my email?

• It means you clicked a confirmation link, so we know that address really reaches you.
• It gates nothing. Confirmed or not, you can do exactly the same things. It exists so a typo gets caught now, rather than the night you need a reset link and it goes nowhere.
• Send one from your dashboard. It expires in a day and works once.

Do you email me for anything else?

• No. Two kinds of message exist — a reset link and a confirmation link — and both are only sent because you asked. There is no mailing list, no digest, no announcements.