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.

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.

Nothing. There’s no paid tier, no trial running out, and no card.

Your first class

Everything you need to run Moles with a class for the first time. It takes about five minutes to read, and the class itself fits in 25 minutes, so it works inside a normal period.

The day before

Play one round yourself. On the teachers page, pick your course and tap “Try a round yourself first”. Two minutes as a player makes the rules easy to explain. You type your clues there, against practice players; in class, students say theirs out loud.
Check it opens on the school network, on a student device if you can. If students would see “Can't reach the game”, the school's filter is blocking it: ask IT to allow both moles.fun and party.moles.fun (the second carries the live game, and is the one that gets missed). Email us and we'll write the request for you.
Optional: sign in before you set up. It's free, and it lets you drop into any group during the lesson. Without signing in you can still run the whole class; you just watch from the board.

Setting up the room (about a minute)

On the teachers page, pick your course and what to review (one unit, or the whole course), then tap Start a class.
Type your name. Everything else can stay as it is for a first class. If you'd rather turns weren't timed, choose No timer; to have students explain terms without looking them up, turn off Show definitions.
Tap Create Room. You'll get the room code and a QR code to put on the board.

A 25-minute lesson

0–3 minExplain the game in one breath: “Everyone gets the same study term except one person, the Mole, who only gets a vague clue. On your turn, describe the term without saying it. Then we vote on who was bluffing.”

3–6 minPut the room code (or the QR code) on the projector. Students go to moles.fun, tap Enter Code, and type their first name. Their names appear on your screen as they arrive.

6–7 minTap Split the Class into Rooms, then Shuffle Everyone In. Groups of four or five start on their own as soon as each one fills.

7–22 minGroups play. Your screen becomes the class board: every group, which round it's on, and who's ahead. Walk the room; the board will tell you which group has gone quiet.

22–25 minTap End class to freeze the final standings across every group, and leave them on the projector. Ask: “Which term was hardest to explain?” That answer is your next lesson.

Good to know

Late arrivals use the same code, and they're placed into a group.
If a student's wifi drops, their screen says “Reconnecting you…” and they come back to the same seat in the same game.
When a game ends, the student running that group can tap Play Again. To have groups keep going on their own, tick Automatically play again when a match ends when you split the class.
With chat on, a player can type their turn instead of saying it out loud.
Any device with a web browser works: phones, Chromebooks, laptops, tablets. A student without one can pair up with a neighbour and play as one player.
Seven groups talking at once is louder than a quiz. Spreading groups to different corners helps, and each group only needs to hear its own four or five voices.

If something goes wrong

“Nobody's hosting that code”: the code was mistyped. Capital letters don't matter; the five characters do.
“Can't reach the game” on every device: the school network is blocking it. See “The day before”, step 2.
A student was removed by mistake: tap Let back in next to their name in the room's list of removed players.

Students' privacy

Students don't make accounts or give an email address: they join with a code and a first name or nickname. The names on your class board are deleted after 30 days. The details are on Privacy & Legal.

Tell us how it went

If anything confused your students or got in the way, email [email protected]. That is the most useful thing a first class can give us.