Who Should Play Which Role
What each seat demands, who tends to be good at it, when to rotate, and how to make a lobby of strangers work.
Checked with game version 1.1.0
The three seats ask for different things, and the usual instinct, giving the loudest person the microphone and the leader the manual, is wrong often enough to be worth a page. This is the community consensus from guides, reviews and forum threads, not an official ranking.
The seats
| Role | Suits | Avoid if |
|---|---|---|
| Deaf | The clearest, calmest speaker, who can hold several short facts at once (position, colour, number, stage) and watch the bomb and the mute player at the same time. It is the bottleneck of every round and the seat that burns out first. | You pick whoever talks the most. Volume is not clarity. |
| Mute | A fast reader who scans a page for keywords and can stay silent under pressure. Usually the hardest seat for beginners, because everything they know has to leave through their hands. | A chronic narrator who will leak answers out loud and get the team used to a channel that is supposed to be closed. |
| Blind | Calm hands. The lightest mental load and the highest cost per mistake, so the seat for someone who is happy to wait, repeat back, and make exactly one input. | Impulsive players who queue inputs or act on half a sentence. |
Rotating
Rotate seats between bombs, not between modules, and only when the same mistake keeps happening in the same seat. Everyone should have played every role once, because the deaf player gives better callouts after having been blind, and the mute player signs better after having been deaf.
Playing with strangers
Matchmaking and the server browser put the whole burden on voice. What works, according to players who do it a lot:
- Filter the browser by country to land in a lobby that shares a language.
- Do a mic check and settle yes, no and wait in the lobby before anyone touches the start button. Every round that skips this loses it back in level 4.
- If the first bomb goes badly, move the clearest speaker to deaf before anything else.
- Use the random-role button as a mixer, not as a rule.
- Keep good strangers: Steam's friends list has a "recently played with" entry.
- Do not add an external voice chat. It removes the asymmetry the game is built on, and most players who try it report the game stops being fun.