The signalslie to you.

SIGNAL FAULT is a fast, real-time card game where every card fights itself: it names a color, it’s printed in a different color, and it repeats a number of times. A live "protocol" decides which of those three things actually counts – Color, Word or Count – and that rule keeps flipping mid-round while System Fault cards (Panic, Smoke, Miswire, Shift Change) scramble the board. Your job is to read each signal and route it to the right channel faster than everyone else, without letting your own instincts trick you. It plays online in the browser and as a physical tabletop card game.

SIGNAL FAULT is built for 1 to 6 players. Online, LIVE and CHAIN support 2–6 players, whether everyone is on their own phone or sharing one screen; TEAMS is for even groups only – 2, 4 or 6 players. The physical edition covers 1–6: the core box adds SOLO: FEED RUN, a one-player time trial on the CHAIN engine, and the MELTDOWN expansion adds SABOTEUR, a co-op mode where the table works together against a meltdown with one hidden traitor. So it scales from a solo run against the clock, through a quick two-player duel, up to a loud six-player table.

It depends on how you play. Online is the fast version: the real-time engine shuffles, deals and scores instantly, so a single race can be over in a few minutes and a full session usually runs about 10–20 minutes. The physical tabletop game plays longer – closer to 20–40 minutes – because you shuffle and deal by hand, enforce the physical handicaps, and argue about who misread what. Either way it teaches in about ten minutes.

Ages 10 and up. There is very little to memorize – you learn the three protocols and the jam rule in about ten minutes – so first-timers can join straight away. The challenge is not the rules; it is that your brain instinctively reads the word instead of the ink, so even adults who "know" the rule keep getting caught. That makes it work for mixed-age and family tables as well as competitive groups.

Yes, completely. The real-time version runs free in any modern web browser at play.signal-fault.com – no app to install, no account to create, and no payment. Everyone joins from their own phone with a short room code, or you can cast one shared board to a laptop or TV and let the room play from their phones. Native Apple TV and Google TV apps are on the way too. The only thing that will cost money is the physical card game when it launches.

SIGNAL FAULT requires normal color vision, and we’d rather say that up front: reading ink colors at speed is the core mechanic, so there is no icon or pattern workaround that wouldn’t replace the game itself. The palette is tuned to stay separable under mild red-green color vision deficiency (protanomaly and deuteranomaly) – the four colors differ in lightness as well as hue – so many players with a mild deficiency can play normally. With a stronger deficiency the COLOR protocol stops being a fair fight. If someone at your table is affected, CHAIN is the friendliest mode: you can match cards on word or count instead of ink, and the WORD and COUNT protocols don’t use ink color at all.

Yes – SIGNAL FAULT started life as a physical card game, and the tabletop edition is in active development. It is planned as two boxes: the core box, with the Signal, Protocol and System Fault cards for LIVE, CHAIN and SOLO, and the SIGNAL FAULT: MELTDOWN expansion, which adds the Team, Role, SHIFT CHANGE and divider cards for TEAMS and SABOTEUR. Thick cards, bold inks, and the same control-room chaos you see online – with some rules (like the one-hand rule and the physical Panic and Smoke handicaps) that only exist at the table. The table also adds modes the online build doesn’t have, including SOLO: FEED RUN, a one-player time trial against the clock. It is not in print yet – join the launch list to hear about the print run, the launch date, and where to get it first.