Support
Keep the round moving.
Chinwag has no account to recover and no room code to troubleshoot, so most questions here are about the game itself. Start with the one that matches yours, or email us at the bottom.
Release status
Apple has approved version 1.0 and marked it ready for sale, but its App Store page is not appearing in any storefront yet. Until it does, there is nothing to install. The App Store link is already prepared and will start working the moment the listing surfaces. There is no Android or browser version in this release.
How do I play, and what is a round?
One iPhone, one room, passed from hand to hand. Only the person holding the phone needs the app. You pick one deck or several, then tap Start 20-card round.
A round is exactly 20 cards. Each card carries the format, the question, and one line telling the room what to do with it: point at someone, put a finger down, pick a side. Read all three out loud. Tap the card or swipe left for the next one, swipe right or press Previous to go back. The header counts your place, so nobody has to ask how long is left.
There is no timer, no score and nothing to win. Press End round whenever the group is done, even at card nine. Ending a round shows how many questions the room survived, and offers another round with the same decks or a change of decks. The screen stays awake while a card is up, and if a round is interrupted, reopening the app puts you back on the same card. The longer version of all this lives on how to play.
Do I need an account, or Wi-Fi?
No to both, and neither is a temporary state of things.
There is no sign-up, no email, no room code and no name entry. Nobody else at the table installs anything. The whole prompt catalogue is bundled into the app, so a round runs on a plane, in a hostel with hostile Wi-Fi, or in a pub corner with one bar of signal. The only part that needs a connection is payment, which goes through your Apple Account, and the free New Friends deck keeps playing even when the store cannot be reached at all.
Can I pass on a question?
Always, and without giving a reason. There is a Pass button under every card. Press it and the round moves on: no forfeit, no drink, no counter, and no record of who passed or how often. A pass behaves exactly like any other advance.
Say the rule out loud before the first card rather than after somebody looks uncomfortable. Said early it is a house rule for everyone. Said late it is a spotlight on one person.
What is free, and what does Chinwag Plus include?
New Friends stays free forever. That is the complete 140-prompt deck, not a sample, and it can run full offline rounds on its own. Your Cards, where you write your own prompts, is free too, and so is Duo's Funny & Everyday mood for two players.
The catalogue is twenty-six decks and 3,069 prompts in total. Chinwag Plus unlocks the other twenty-five group decks and their 2,929 prompts, the remaining four Duo moods, and the curated decks added in later updates. Planned United States pricing is US$19.99 yearly or US$2.99 monthly. There is no free trial: the free deck does not expire. There is no weekly plan, no lifetime purchase and no advertising. Full detail is on the pricing page.
Locked decks can be previewed before you decide. Declining or cancelling never removes New Friends.
How do I restore a purchase?
Open Settings in the app and tap Restore Purchases. That brings back a subscription bought on another iPhone or before a reinstall, without charging you again, because the subscription belongs to your Apple Account rather than to a login with us.
Restore needs a connection, and it will not find anything if you are signed in to a different Apple Account from the one that paid. To change or cancel the plan itself, use Manage subscription in the same place, which opens your own App Store settings.
How do I redeem a code?
Open Settings, tap Redeem a code, and Apple's own redemption sheet opens over the app. Type the code there. When the sheet closes, Chinwag re-checks your subscription and tells you what it found.
If nothing unlocked, the app will say so plainly rather than blame the code. That is deliberate: Apple does not tell the app whether a code applied, so a code that was mistyped and a sheet that was closed without typing anything look identical from here. Check the code and try again, and if it still does not take, email us with the code you were given.
What is Family Mode?
Choose Continue with Family Mode at first launch whenever anyone playing is under 18, or turn it on later in Settings. It restricts the game to six reviewed decks: Family, Road Trip, Animals & Nature, Family Would You Rather, Christmas, and a hand-checked mixed-age subset of New Friends, 55 of its 140 questions rather than all of them.
While it is on, every adult, dating and 18+ deck is unavailable, including one that was already selected before the switch went on. Duo is disabled, no purchase screen appears, and Your Cards sits the round out, because only reviewed prompts enter a mixed-age room. All of it is free; Family Mode never asks you to upgrade.
On supported Apple devices, an under-18 age range shared privately by iOS turns Family Mode on automatically, and an adult cannot switch it off for that session. Chinwag never receives a birthday and does not create child profiles. It is a safer shared-room filter, not a substitute for an adult paying attention.
What do the content switches remove?
Under Fit the room in Settings there are three switches, named for what they take out rather than who they are for. They work whether or not Family Mode is on.
| Switch | What it actually removes |
|---|---|
| No drinking | Cards that name alcohol or a drinking occasion: beer, wine, cocktails, hungover, pub, and the rest. |
| No dating or romance | Cards that name dating, exes, crushes, kissing, weddings, partners or being in love. |
| No confessions | The whole "Never have I ever" format, whatever an individual card is about. Nothing else. |
Two things the names do not tell you. First, turning on any of the three also stands down all four 18+ decks for that session, whole, rather than filtering them; a keyword list cannot see everything in an adult deck, so the app does not pretend it can. Second, a deck that drops below 20 usable prompts is removed from the picker rather than dealt as a thin round.
The switches read the words printed on each card. That makes them precise about what they promise and blunt about what they cannot see: a card that circles a subject without naming it can still come up. If one does, pass it, and tell us which card it was.
Reset pack selection
Return to Packs and tap each pack to select or deselect it. Chinwag remembers the selection on the device. Rounds also prefer cards this phone has not dealt before, and Start fresh in Settings clears that history for a new group. Deleting the app removes all of its local game state.
Sharing does not open
Chinwag uses the iOS share sheet. If it does not open, close and reopen the app, then try again.
What data does the app collect?
No accounts, so no name, email or profile. No answers, votes, scores or record of what was said in your group, because none of that is ever stored anywhere. No advertising identifiers, no location, no contacts, camera or microphone.
What stays on your iPhone: your pack selection, your Family Mode and content switches, and the IDs of cards you have already seen, so new rounds can prefer fresh ones. That never leaves the device and goes when the app does.
What leaves the phone is short. Crash reports go to a Sentry server we run ourselves, and question text is stripped out before a report is sent, so a crash tells us the deck and the fault and nothing about the card. Subscriptions go through Apple and RevenueCat, which see an anonymous identifier and your purchase status, never your name or your decks. The iPhone app carries no usage-analytics SDK at all. This website is a separate thing and does use Google Analytics, with ad personalisation off. The full account is on the privacy page.
A question felt wrong
Skip it immediately. Anyone can pass without giving a reason, and a host who visibly moves on teaches the room that no single card matters. Automated checks reject known unsafe patterns and likely duplicates, but context matters, and feedback from real groups is what keeps shaping the catalogue. Tell us which card it was and where it came up.
Tell us what happened
Include the device, iOS version and what you tapped immediately before the problem. If it is about a purchase, add the Support ID from the bottom of Settings; press and hold it until Copy appears. It identifies your install and nothing personal. Please do not include private answers from your group.
Back to the party?
Check the release status while the iPhone app is prepared for distribution.