The one who can’t explain it gets caught.
Students explain a term out loud in small groups. One of them was secretly given a different word and has to bluff. 25 minutes, the terms are already written, and students don’t need accounts.
Start a class takes you to the room settings. Nothing starts until you press Create Room and students type in the code. Trying a round is just you, against practice players, with no account.
Here’s one round of AP World History, dealt to a group of five.
Song Dynasty
Chinese dynasty of 960–1279, marked by rapid urban growth, paper money, an expanded civil service, and the most commercialised economy in the world at the time.
Commercialization
That’s all they get — a hint, not the term the other four are holding — and the same forty seconds as everyone else to sound like they knew it.
They each describe it out loud, then the group works out who was faking. It turns out you can’t fake Song Dynasty to four people who actually studied it.
How a lesson runs
You pick a course, put a five-character code on the projector, and go. Nothing to set up the night before, and nothing for the classroom to install.
Put the code up
Five characters on the board. Students join on their own devices with a nickname — no accounts, no email addresses, nothing to download.
Split the class
One tap splits up to 45 students into small games of four or five, so everyone actually talks instead of twenty-five people watching one conversation.
Watch every room
One board shows every group at once: who’s speaking, who’s ahead, who’s gone quiet. Put it on the projector, nudge a quiet group, or message every group at once (“Two minutes left”).
End the class
One tap turns the board into the class results: most wins, the best bluffers, and which groups caught their Mole. Leave it up while everyone packs their bags.
What to check the day before, the exact buttons to press, and a 25‑minute lesson plan.
How students join
They open moles.fun on any device, tap Enter Code and type the code on your board, or scan its QR code. Then a first name or nickname, and they’re in. No accounts, nothing to install.
What’s on the projector
Every group on one screen. Each one plays at its own pace, and you can see which are still debating, which are voting and who’s winning.
What’s on their phones
Most of the group gets the real term. The game calls them Civilians. The Mole gets a decoy clue instead and has to talk as if they know the rest.
Turns go in order and the screen says whose turn it is, so you don’t have to. There’s a hide button for when a phone gets passed around.
The content’s already written
Twenty AP courses, built unit by unit against the College Board frameworks, so a Unit 4 review is something you start rather than something you assemble. You can host your own terms instead, or bring in a set you already have.
AP courses
20
plus 6 just-for-fun decks, like superheroes and food
Study terms
14,658
across those courses
Units
149
run one, or the whole course
Class size
45
split into small games automatically
Send this bit to your IT department
Everything they’re going to ask, in one place.
- Two hostnames need to be reachable
- moles.fun and party.moles.fun, both over HTTPS/WSS on port 443. No wildcards, no other domains, nothing to install on a single machine.
- Students never make an account
- They join with a room code and a display name they type themselves. We never ask a student for an email address, a date of birth, or a photo.
- What’s kept, and for how long
- When a class splits, each small room sends its display names and win counts to your board so you can follow along. That’s deleted after 30 days. There’s no per-student profile, no record of what anyone answered, and nothing carried from one lesson to the next.
- Chat
- Free-text chat is off by default and stays off unless you turn it on. A student running one of the small rooms can’t turn it on for their group.
- What it costs
- Nothing. There’s no paid tier, no trial running out, and no card.
What we don’t have yet
Moles has no signed data protection agreement with any district yet, and no third-party privacy certification. Moles.fun LLC can sign one — if your district has a form it uses, send it over and we’ll tell you honestly whether we can meet it.
We can put that plainly because of how little there is to agree about. A student can play a whole lesson without ever giving us a name we could match to them outside that room.
Run it with one class and tell me what broke
That’s the real ask. Moles is built and looked after by one person, and the teachers who run it are the only reason it gets better — a note saying which bit confused your students is worth more than a sign-up. One lesson is enough to tell.