Yomibito-Shirazu (Anonymous Poet)
A collaborative haiku/senryu paper-and-pen poetry party game
Players
3–50 players
Play Time
10min-
A collaborative haiku/senryu paper-and-pen poetry party game
Yomibito-shirazu (lit. "poet unknown") is a word game where players write one character at a time to collaboratively build 5-7-5 haiku (or senryu). Profound, funny, or moving — let chance and your group create poetry. Communication during the game is generally banned, so it works online via video, voice, or text chat. Round-robin character-by-character entry over 17 turns produces an entire haiku.
You're randomly handed one work to add to — type a single character. Once everyone has typed, the next work comes around. The number of works = player count × 2. The 1st character round happens twice, and each subsequent character round also runs twice.
One vote per player. Vote for your favorite work. You can decide together what "best" means (most moving, funniest, scariest, etc.).
Each player's score = (votes received) × (characters entered). Example: Work 1 got 3 votes; Player A entered 10 characters in it, B entered 7, C entered 0 → A: 30, B: 21, C: 0 — A wins. Besides rankings, you can browse all finished works. Tapping a character shows who typed it.
Dokopa offers fine-grained rule customization.
These settings are a good place to start.
Score = (number of characters entered for the voted work) × (number of votes). Highest score wins
After all works are finished, each player casts 1 vote for the best one
Just browsing the finished works is fun, but the real fun is the post-mortem — where did this go off the rails, what were you thinking?
You may never see the same work twice. If a masterpiece emerges, screenshot it
Try Anonymous Mode off first; once you're comfortable, turn it on — the same group can write surprisingly wilder things
Play Yomibito-Shirazu (Anonymous Poet) for free on the Dokopa app.
