Death by AI: the party game where an AI judges your plan

Death by AI is a free party game where an AI decides if your plan to survive works. The AI gives everyone a deadly scenario. Each player types how they would survive it. Then the AI tells the story of each plan and says who lives and who dies.

Playroom made the game. Playroom is part of Little Umbrella, a company in Palo Alto. Playroom calls Death by AI “a prompt based survival party game for up to 10 players.” You can play it on Discord, in a web browser, and on iOS, as TechCrunch reported.

The AI host is called Bob. The game became very popular on Discord in 2024. Little Umbrella said that it reached 20 million players within its first three months.

Read the scenario, type your plan within 60 seconds, and wait for the verdict. A game has 5 rounds. The player with the most survival points wins. These steps come from the official guide of Playroom.

1. Pick a character.
2. Invite friends, or play alone.
3. Read the scenario. It describes a danger for every player.
4. Type your strategy to survive. You have 60 seconds.
5. The AI judges each strategy and says what happens to each player.
6. Survivors get points. After 5 rounds, the highest score wins.

You can turn on an AI voice in the settings, so the host reads the results out loud.

Can you play Death by AI alone?

Yes. A player asked this on Hacker News: “Is it possible to play alone?” The Playroom guide now says that you can invite friends or play solo. The game is more fun with a group, because you compare the plans and the deaths.

How many players can join?

Sources disagree. Playroom says up to 10 players. TechCrunch says up to 8. A later Playroom post mentions rooms of 4 to 10.

The Playroom guide lists two modes and one modifier:

Can you write your own scenario?

Yes. You can pick Random Scenario, or write a custom scenario for the group. TechBriefly published a list of custom prompts in May 2024.

Death by AI runs as a Discord Activity. You start it from a server, and your friends join from the same place. The Playroom guide for Discord, dated May 7, 2024, links to the help page of Discord for the exact buttons.

1. Open a Discord server where you can start Activities.
2. Open the Activities menu and pick Death by AI.
3. Wait for your friends to join the Activity.
4. Pick the mode and start the game.

Discord says in its case study that the game launched in one region first, and then in every region. If you do not see it, check that the server allows Activities.

Can you play Death by AI without Discord?

Yes. The official site, deathbyai.gg, calls it a game “to play with your friends and family on mobile and web.” Open the site in a browser and invite your friends. Playroom first released the game on the web in November 2023, before the Discord launch.

Yes. The game is free to play, as TechCrunch reported. On Discord, it also sells extras. The Discord case study lists “subscriptions in various tiers, one-time purchases, and game credits.” Prompt packs, sets of new scenarios, are in the shop.

We could not confirm the price of each extra, or whether you need Discord Nitro. Check the shop in the game before you buy.

Death by AI started on the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models of OpenAI, with ElevenLabs for the voice. It then moved to the language models and the voices of Inworld. Inworld, the vendor, says that the team switched because of cost, speed, and humor that did not work in some languages.

The Discord case study names OpenAI, LLaMA, and Inworld for text, and ElevenLabs and Inworld for voice. At its peak, the game used more than 1.2 billion text tokens a day. A token is a small piece of text that the model reads or writes.

Is the AI fair?

Not always. A player on Hacker News wrote that the AI decides who lives, “but it’s definitely pretty random sometimes.” Another player asked: “How easy is to cheat and gain points adding ‘carefully’ in the middle of a sentence?” Playroom says that it guards against prompt injection, which is text that tries to trick the AI. Treat the verdict as part of the joke, not as a score that proves skill.

Death by AI had tens of millions of players, by its own numbers. All the numbers come from Playroom, Little Umbrella, or their partners. We found no independent count.

Playroom gives two speeds for the first 5 million: 14 days in one post, and the first week in another. In January 2025, Little Umbrella raised a $2 million seed round. TechCrunch reported that its next game is The Last Show by AI, with an AI game show host.

TechCrunch and Hacker News compare Death by AI to the Jackbox party games. If you like an AI that reacts to your words, try these games:

• Your AI Slop Bores Me: you play as the human or as the AI.
• Human or AI: you chat and guess if the other side is a person or a bot.
• Suck Up!: you talk AI characters into letting you in.
• Friends and Fables: an AI game master runs a tabletop adventure.

For a wider list, see our guides to AI games and games where you can talk to AI.

Death by AI is a short party game. Each round is a new scenario, and nothing carries over. That is the point: fast laughs with friends.

LifeSim, the game we make, uses AI in a different way. You live one life in a real city, and you play alone. You type what you say, and the people of your life answer in their own words and remember it. It is not a party game, and it has no rounds or points. If you want a game for a group call, choose Death by AI. If you want a story that lasts, read how to play LifeSim.

For story games where your words matter, see AI roleplay and story games.

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• Death by AI: official site
• Playroom: How to play Death by AI on Discord
• Playroom: 5M players on a Discord game
• Playroom: Discord Activity playbook
• Playroom: Death by AI, Twitch insights and Godot
• Discord: Playroom case study
• Inworld: Death by AI customer story
• TechCrunch: Little Umbrella's next Jackbox-style game
• Gamespress: Little Umbrella secures $2 million seed round
• TechBriefly: Best custom Death by AI prompts
• Hacker News: Death by AI, a free Jackbox style party game