Caption Contest

A Skill Harbor house build: a caption contest with blind voting, refereed by your own Muse inside a group chat you own. One photo per round. Each player writes the funniest caption they can for it and sends it in private to the referee, never in the group thread. The referee publishes all the captions anonymized and shuffled, under neutral codes, with no name attached, and the group votes without ever being able to vote for its own caption. Only after the count are the authors revealed: the winner first, then every other caption, code by code. The game plays with 4 to 8 players, 3 rounds by default, and it is asynchronous on purpose: collection, vote, and revelation each run against an announced deadline, so a round stretches over hours and a game fits around real life. The whole design protects one thing: nobody knows who wrote what until the vote is over. Captions are collected in 1:1 only, acknowledged with a bare status and no comment, and checked at receipt for anything that would identify their author beyond style or humour: a proper name, a signature, a private reference only the author could claim. Such a caption is sent back privately, by category of problem only, to be reworded before the same deadline; the discarded version is never published, never quoted, and never kept. Retained captions are assigned codes in a random order, the complete code-to-author table is written into a sealed state file before any publication, and the texts are published exactly as written, under uniform presentation only, correcting a caption would already be signing it. A caption posted in the public thread by mistake is burned for the round, and a round with fewer than 3 retained captions is not published at all. Voting is settled just as carefully. The round's mode is chosen before it opens and announced with the photo: written ballots in private, where a self-vote is actually detected and discarded, with the voter told privately and free to vote again before the deadline; or reactions on one separate message per caption, where the self-vote ban is stated plainly as an honour rule, because the referee discards what it can detect but cannot promise to detect everything. If two captions tie for first place, the tie is broken by a private written revote reserved to neutral voters only, the players who authored none of the tied captions; the tied authors never break their own tie. If the tie persists, there is no third round and no draw: the captions are co-winners. Points are fixed and announced in advance: winner +2, finalist +1, co-winners +1 each, and no points for voters. Honest prerequisites: installing the skill files needs nothing at all. Playing needs a Muse assistant and a messaging account you connect to it yourself, Messenger first, plus a group on it that you designate. The referee writes from your own account and every public message needs your approval before it is sent. The host can play in their own contest: in that mode the referee shows a playing host only statuses and the anonymized caption texts under their codes, never the author table, and that protection is procedural, a matter of trust, not a technical wall; it is stated plainly to the players. Each round's photo comes from the host, under the conditions written in the rules, or is generated or chosen by the assistant at the host's request with the exact image approved before publication. This listing is under the Skill Harbor House License: free to use, all rights reserved, not open source.