How to play WhoseChat, the Twitch chat guessing game
WhoseChat is a small daily puzzle about something every Twitch viewer already knows without realising it: chats do not look alike. A speedrun channel, a Spanish variety channel, a Counter-Strike watch party and a VTuber all talk differently. They use different emotes, they type in different languages, they react at different speeds, and they repeat different jokes. WhoseChat shows you a chat with the channel name removed, and you work out whose it is.
The rules
- You start with four messages from one channel.
- You have five guesses in the daily puzzle and six in the live mode. Every guess has to be a streamer from the list, so you can always open the box and look at who is in the game.
- Each wrong guess reveals two more messages and compares your guess with the hidden channel on three things: language, follower count and average viewer count. Green means a match, and an arrow tells you whether the hidden channel is bigger or smaller than the one you guessed.
- A correct guess is marked green, a wrong one red, so you always see where you stand.
- Stuck? There are three hints per round. The first gives you the language, the second the follower count (in the live mode, what the channel is streaming right now), and the third the first letter of the name.
- Solve it and the channel is revealed with a link to it.
What to look for
Most people get much better at this after a few rounds, because the clues are learnable:
- Language. The fastest filter, and the first thing the feedback confirms. A chat full of "JAJAJAJA" is Spanish, "KKKKKK" is Brazilian, "MDRRR" and "ptdr" are French, "草" and "www" are Japanese.
- Emotes. Global emotes like LULW or KEKW tell you little, but channel emotes are a fingerprint. WhoseChat masks the channel name inside emote names, so you get the vibe without the free answer.
- The game being played. Chat reacts to clutches, drafts, raids and bosses. If people are shouting about an ace, you are in an FPS channel.
- Speed and tone. A huge channel scrolls fast with short messages. A smaller one has conversations. Just Chatting audiences argue, FPS audiences comment on aim.
- Running jokes. Every long-running community has a phrase it repeats. Once you know a few of them, the game gets a lot easier.
The three modes
Daily
One puzzle per day, the same one for everybody, with a streak counter and a spoiler-free result you can copy and share. This is the mode most people play.
Practice
Ten chats in a row from the same pool, in random order, any time you want. Good for learning the clues before you care about your streak.
Live
The live mode does not use prepared text at all. It connects to Twitch chat anonymously, finds a channel that is actually streaming at that moment, and shows you its real chat. You get six guesses, and before you start you choose how the round works: a sample of the first 5, 10 or 20 messages to study at your own pace, or a continuous live feed with a sixty second clock. You can also narrow the channels by size and by language. The pool here is the big one, the top channels of fourteen languages, so the first thing worth reading is the language.
Chat bots are filtered out, because a command response tells you nothing about the channel and would waste a slot in a short sample.
Because the chat is real and live, it is also unmoderated by us: you see whatever people are typing in that channel right now. The channel name is masked, and you can blur @mentions, so the chat itself does not give the answer away immediately.
FAQ
Is this the same as Chatdle?
No, they are different games with similar names. Chatdle gives you one channel and asks you to identify one of its chatters. WhoseChat gives you a chat and asks which channel it belongs to. If you were looking for the one about chatters, the link above is the right place.
Are the chats real?
In the live mode, yes, they are real messages arriving in real time. In the daily and practice modes they are written recreations: messages in the style of that community, with invented usernames. They are not copied chat logs, and nothing in them is attributed to a real viewer.
Where do the streamer details come from?
Follower counts, average viewer counts, profile pictures and the channel language come from public Twitch statistics, the kind you find on sites like TwitchTracker. They are a snapshot, so treat them as hints rather than live numbers.
Is it affiliated with Twitch?
No. WhoseChat is an independent fan project. Twitch is a trademark of its owner, and the streamers in the game have nothing to do with it.
Which channels are in the game?
Around six hundred, taken from the top of the ranking in each of fourteen languages, so a Spanish or Brazilian or Japanese chat is just as likely to come up as an English one. The daily puzzles use a smaller, more recognisable set.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes. The chat is on top, the guess box underneath, and on a wide screen they sit side by side.
Privacy
WhoseChat runs entirely in your browser. There is no account and no server of ours storing your games: your streak and your current puzzle live in your browser's local storage, and clearing your site data resets them. The live mode connects to Twitch chat anonymously, as a read-only viewer, and messages are not stored anywhere by us after they scroll away.
Page views are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which works without cookies, does not build a profile of you and cannot follow you to other sites.