Chat pester

How to play Chat pester

A streamer is trying to get through their show, and you are the worst person in their chat. Before you join, read the streamer's tells: one pet peeve that stings twice as hard and one blind spot they ignore while they are still calm. Then every few seconds four messages appear: a backhanded compliment, a confidently wrong fact, an off-topic question about the streamer's cat and a plain "first". Tap one, or press 1 to 4, before the timer runs out, or your thumbs post the first one on their own. Some messages get ignored and some get read aloud, and the mood meter slides from cheerful through flustered and exasperated to ranting. Reactions read out during a rant are worth the most chaos, and certain combinations set off special meltdowns. The round ends when the streamer bans you. Your final score is the chaos you caused, multiplied by how long your fuse lasted. Daily mode gives everyone the same streamer and message deck, endless mode shuffles both.

Tips

• Sending the same kind of message twice in a row gets tuned out, which makes it a handy brake
• Hit the pet peeve to climb fast, and save it for when you want a rant
• A long fuse multiplies everything, so a calm minute early on is not wasted
• Everything stings harder as the stream goes on, so the last minute is a tightrope
• Try cat, anything, cat on every streamer and see what happens

About Chat pester

Chat pester is a comedy game about the small, harmless chaos of a live chat. Five invented streamers each run their own show: a sunny home cook with an ambitious risotto, a speedrunner chasing a record in a game about a very determined snail, a whispering study host with rain sounds and a desk lamp, a plant lover repotting forty houseplants and a gentle giant building a model railway the size of a tea tray. Each one has a cat, a personality and tells you can learn, and every one of them has eight reactions for each of the four mood levels, so the same stream rarely plays out the same way twice. The scoring is a push-your-luck balance. Rants pay the most, but a ban ends the round, and the longer the fuse, the bigger the multiplier. The humour stays affectionate: nobody is insulted for who they are, the worst thing anyone suffers is a split sauce or a dropped tiny sheep, and the meltdowns are written so you end up rooting for the streamer. Every streamer, show, cat, message and reaction was written for this game.

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