5 Signs Your Friend Needs a Trick Quiz Sent to Them
Everybody has one. The friend whose messaging habits have become a running joke in the group chat, who knows it, and who has made no attempt whatsoever to change.
You cannot fix them. You can, however, send them five yes/no questions where the answer was decided before they opened the link, and watch them spend two minutes failing to press the button they wanted.
Here are the five clearest signs, and the trick that suits each one.
1. They text in novels
You asked whether they were free on Saturday. You received four paragraphs, two of which are about their week, one of which is about somebody you have never met, and none of which contains a yes or a no.
This person does not need more room to express themselves. They need exactly two options and one of them taken away.
The trick to use: dodge. The rigged button slides out from under the cursor every time they get near it. For somebody who treats every question as an invitation to elaborate, being handed a binary choice and then having half of it physically removed is the correct response.
2. They never actually answer the question
Related, but worse. The long texter is at least engaging. This one replies promptly, warmly, at reasonable length, and somehow never addresses the thing you asked.
"Are you coming on Friday?" becomes a thoughtful message about how busy work has been. You will read it twice looking for the answer before realising it was never in there.
The trick to use: multi-click. The rigged button ignores the first few taps entirely. They will press it, nothing will happen, they will press it harder, and eventually they will give up and press the other one. Which is, roughly, how every conversation with them already goes.
3. They are permanently "on their way"
They said that twenty minutes ago. They are not on their way. They may not have left the house. There is a reasonable chance they are still deciding what to wear.
The remarkable thing is that it is never presented as a lie. It is delivered with total sincerity every single time, which is what makes it art.
The trick to use: dodge, again. Something about a button that is always nearly within reach and never quite catchable feels like the right punishment here. Set the question to "are you on your way?" and rig it to No.
4. They double-text, triple-text, quadruple-text
One thought per message. Sometimes one word per message. Your phone buzzes six times and the combined content would have fitted comfortably in a single line.
The trick to use: multi-click. This is the trick that was practically designed for them. Some people need to press a button four times before anything happens, and even then it will not. Send them a quiz built entirely from this and let them experience their own communication style from the other side.
5. They ghost, then reappear as if nothing happened
Gone for nine days. No explanation. Then a meme at 1am like the intervening week never occurred, and no acknowledgement that you asked them something important on the Tuesday.
The trick to use: swap. The two buttons trade places at the exact moment they commit to one, so the click lands on the opposite answer. A button that is in one place, then somewhere else entirely, with no explanation offered, is not subtle. It is not meant to be.
How to actually build it
The whole thing takes about a minute.
- Open the quiz builder and pick Blank Template, so you are writing all five questions yourself.
- Give it a title they will open. Their own name works. So does "quick question".
- Type each question, then choose which of the two buttons should be the hard one. That is the button that dodges. The other one is the answer they will end up giving.
- Vary the trick across the five. Repeating one gets predictable by question three, and the surprise is most of the joke.
- Pick a character to narrate it. Luigi is the right call for anything where the humour is deadpan and the narrator should look as tired as you feel.
- Write the punchline for the result card. This is the bit that gets screenshotted into the group chat.
Every ready made example is playable straight from the page if you want to see the tricks before you write anything, and how it works breaks down each one in detail.
One honest warning
They will work out what is happening within about ten seconds. That is fine. It is not a magic trick and it does not depend on fooling anybody.
The joke is that they keep trying anyway. Everybody does. You will send it, they will immediately understand the mechanic, and they will still spend a minute and a half attempting to press a button that was never going to let them.
Build one and find out how long they last.