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 a daily chat round 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 adds a row of tiles that compares your guess with the hidden channel: profile picture, language, category, followers and average viewers. Green is a match, amber is close and red is wrong. Close means the same kind of game, or followers and viewers within double, and an arrow tells you whether the hidden channel has more or less.
• Stuck? There are three hints per round. The first gives you the language, the second the category (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

Three rounds per day, the same ones for everybody: an easy one, a medium one and a hard one. Most days they are chat rounds, but a round can also be one of the other puzzle types:

• Avatar: the channel's profile picture, pixelated, sharpening with every guess.
• Bio: the channel's own bio, blacked out, with more words uncovered on every guess.
• Emote: the channel's own emotes, one more with every guess.
• Stats: no clues at all, only the tiles and their arrows pointing you to the answer.

There is a streak counter, a spoiler-free result you can copy and share, and a challenge link you can send to a friend. This is the mode most people play.

Practice

Twenty 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. The daily chat rounds are real messages too, captured from that channel's chat, with the channel name masked. The practice chats are written recreations: messages in the style of that community, with invented usernames, not copied chat logs.

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 in your browser and there is no account. Your streak and your current puzzle live in your browser's local storage, not on a server, 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.

Two things are counted, both without cookies. Cloudflare, which hosts the game, counts page views and where visits came from. The game itself reports anonymous play events: which mode was opened, whether a round was solved, how many guesses and hints it took, and how long the visit lasted. That is all used for one thing, to see whether the game is worth keeping.

What is deliberately not collected: no account, no IP address, no device fingerprint, no names you typed, and no identifier that survives closing the tab. Each visit gets a random number that lives in the tab and disappears with it, so one visit cannot be linked to the next, to you, or to any other site.