Before the Game

Everything in this chapter happens before the first turn. None of it changes the core game — but all of it shapes who is at the table and how you present yourself to them.

Lobby Visibility

When you create a lobby, you pick one of three visibility settings. The choice determines who can see it, who can find it, and who can join.

• Open — the lobby is discoverable by anyone browsing the public list. Any player can join until the seats fill.
• Unlisted — the lobby is not in the public list and won’t appear in searches. It can only be joined by someone who has the share link (see below). Use this for games with friends who aren’t on your roster yet.
• Private — invite-only. The lobby appears nowhere public, and the share link will not open it for anyone who isn’t already a member. Invite players explicitly from the lobby’s player panel.

Visibility can be changed from the lobby’s owner menu while the game hasn’t started. Once play begins, the setting is frozen.

Invite Links

Every lobby has a sharable URL of the form backchannel.gg/?invite=<code>. Open an invite link while signed in and the app routes you straight into the lobby — no menu digging required. Open it before signing in and the code is held until auth completes, then applied.

• Owners of Open and Unlisted lobbies can copy the share link from the lobby header.
• Private lobby links only work for players who were invited through the player panel. A stray link to a private lobby is harmless — a non-member can’t use it to join.
• A link shared to someone who is already a member of the lobby will just deep-link them in, not prompt an “already joined” error.

Filling Seats With Bots

A lobby with the Allow Bots setting enabled can be filled with bot players before the game starts. The owner opens the Add Bots dialog from the seat list, picks how many bots to add, and the remaining seats are seated immediately. Bots can be removed the same way up until the game starts.

Bots use the same turn structure, the same cards, and the same negotiation surface as human players. They are not a tutorial mode — they will attack you, propose deals, and play around your agreements.

Anonymous Mode

Anonymous Mode is a lobby setting that separates your real name from your in-game identity. It exists so people who want to play Backchannel without broadcasting their display name to strangers — or without being remembered by their rivals across games — can still play the full social layer of the game.

What Is and Is Not Anonymous

• Lobby seat list — real display names. You know who you’re about to sit down with.
• After-action history — real display names in the player column; pseudonyms revealed alongside them. Everyone learns who was who after the game ends.
• Everywhere else in-game — pseudonyms. The scoreboard, HUD player colours, event log, signals, agreements, and all notifications use your mask, not your real name.

The boundary is deliberate: you agree to sit down with known people, you play against masks, you learn the mapping after the result is locked in.

Choosing a Mask

When you join an Anonymous Mode lobby, the Choose Mask dialog opens. A mask is a compound pseudonym built from three parts:

• Title — an honorific or role (e.g., “Chancellor”, “Warden”).
• Front — the primary name element.
• Rear — a suffix or second-name element. Front and Rear together form a single compound name.

The compound name editor lets you regenerate any part independently, drag-to-reorder parts, and use the ESTATE and CONJ buttons to insert appropriate connective tissue (possessives, conjunctions) between parts. The generator draws from a title + governance vocabulary designed to suit Backchannel’s faction language, so random masks usually read as faction-appropriate rather than silly.

Edit Window

You can change your mask freely inside the lobby before the game starts. Once play begins, you can still adjust your mask until your first turn ends. After that, the mask is frozen for the rest of the game.

This window exists so you can react to your actual seat colour, your neighbours, or your starting position — sometimes the right name for you as the purple player on the north border isn’t the one you picked in the lobby.

After-Action Reveal

In the game’s history detail view, pseudonyms are shown alongside their real players. You can see which mask belonged to whom for every game you played. In-game, the mapping stays hidden even after the game ends — it’s only the persistent history record that performs the reveal.

Previewing a Map

Most lobbies tell you which map you’ll be playing on. Before you commit a seat, you can open the map in a read-only inspector and see exactly what you’re getting into — territories, connections, bonus zones, spawn placement, the lot.

From the new-lobby screen’s map picker, tap the preview icon next to the selected map. The inspector opens at /map-viewer with the same map and version the lobby will use. The inspector has three tabs:

• Overview — the whole map at a glance, with the canvas centered and zoom-clamped to the author’s intended frame.
• Territories & Bonuses — tap any node on the canvas and the side panel fills with that territory’s connections, bonus memberships, and any modifiers in play.
• Spawns — see which spawn groups are configured and which territories belong to each. Useful for guessing your starting position before the game shuffles seats.

The UNPUBLISHED badge

If you’re previewing someone’s draft — usually because a map author shared a link before publishing — the inspector shows an UNPUBLISHED badge in the panel header. You’re looking at a work-in-progress, not the public version. Map authors can read more about this flow in Cartography → Validation & Publishing.

Before You Start

A quick checklist before clicking START GAME:

• Visibility is correct for this crowd (Open for pickup, Private for friends).
• Every seat that should be bot-filled is filled; every seat that should be human is human.
• If you care about identity hygiene, Anonymous Mode is on and your mask reads the way you want it to.
• Map and settings are what you think they are — once the first turn starts, most of it freezes.