Rooms now fit eight players

Blip Party rooms have capped at four players since July — six for the couple of games that need a crowd to work at all. That number was chosen early and defensively: fewer players meant fewer edge cases while sixty games were still being built.

It has been the wrong number for a while. Party games are for the group you actually have, and the group you actually have is regularly five or six people. A cap of four meant half the rooms people wanted to open could not be opened.

So rooms now seat eight.

Why eight, and not ten

The honest answer is that eight is how many colours we have. Every player in a room gets an identity colour, and it is doing more work than it looks: it is your row on the scoreboard, your player chip, and — in Gridlock and Sudoku — the colour a square turns when you are the one who claimed it.

There are exactly eight of those colours, and they were chosen to stay apart from each other on a phone screen in a dim room. A ninth player would have to wear somebody else's. So the cap is not a server limit or a performance ceiling; it is a design one, and lifting it further means designing a ninth colour that still reads as distinct against the other eight. That is a real piece of work rather than a constant to edit, which is why it is not being done casually.

Six games that stay at six

For nearly every game, one more player is purely additive — another racer on the same board, another lie in the same vote, and the round takes exactly as long as it did before.

Six games are not like that, because in them the room size IS the round length. A relay runs one step per player and then replays every chain at the reveal; a turn clock hands out one turn per player per lap. At eight those do not get better, they get longer, and the last few chains play to a room that has already picked up its phones. Those six keep a cap of six:

• Garble — the drawing-and-describing chain.
• Flipbook — the same relay, aimed at animation.
• Mural — one canvas, passed around, no erasing.
• Garland — clues woven around a ring of words, then handed on.
• Tailword — the word chain round the table, on a turn clock.
• Fuse — the lit bomb that circles the room.

This is untested at eight

Worth saying plainly: nothing here has been played by eight people yet. The change is reasoned about rather than measured, and the games most likely to feel it are the ones where everybody writes and then everybody votes — Punchline, Fibber, Couplet, Backronym. Eight submissions make a longer vote list than anyone has actually sat through.

If a round drags with a full room, that is the thing we want to hear about. There is a feedback box at the end of every match, and it is read.