How We Curate

The five-point bar every topic must clear

1. It must open a conversation, not close one. A topic that can be answered in one word gets rewritten or cut. “Do you like coffee?” fails; “why coffee culture conquered the world” passes.
2. It must work for a stranger. No topic that requires niche knowledge to participate. If a random group of five could not all weigh in, it does not go in the deck.
3. It must be clean and party-safe. Every entry is safe for classrooms, workplaces, and mixed company. There is no “adult mode” and there never will be — plenty of other sites do that.
4. It ships with talking points. Each topic carries three editor-written angles, so a stalled group always has somewhere to go next. A topic we cannot write three interesting angles for is a topic that was not interesting.
5. It gets a depth rating. Every entry is tagged Light, Medium, or Deep by how much vulnerability it asks of the group — so a work icebreaker never accidentally deals a therapy question.

Where topics come from

The seed set was written in-house, category by category, against the bar above. New entries come from two places: reader suggestions via the contact page, and gaps we notice in the database itself — a category light on Deep entries, a mode short on funny ones. Every candidate is rewritten to house style before it enters the database; nothing is scraped or pasted from elsewhere.

The party decks (Would You Rather, Never Have I Ever, Truth or Dare and friends) are maintained separately under a stricter version of rule three: if a prompt could genuinely embarrass a specific person in the room, it is out — the mystery should be fun even when nothing is revealed.

What gets removed

The database is pruned, not just grown. Entries get cut when they age badly (tied to a news cycle that passed) or when a better-phrased duplicate earns the slot. Datedness is the most common reason — a topic that assumes 2023 technology reads as stale in 2026, and stale prompts kill a room faster than hard ones.

About the AI mode

The generator has an optional AI mode for effectively unlimited topics. AI-generated topics are clearly a different thing from the curated deck: they follow the same prompt rules but have not passed human review, and they are never added to the database or to any page on this site. Every topic you can read on a page here — category references, sample lists, party decks — is from the human-curated set.