& us
1,838 prompts and twelve ways to play them, for two people and one phone.
Not a quiz, a compatibility score, or a swipe feed. Nothing to complete.
Dating apps are good at producing a stranger and have nothing to say about the ninety minutes after you sit down. “& us” is only about those ninety minutes — and about the ones you are still having four years in.
It is 1,838 written prompts across fourteen decks, plus twelve play mechanics — game structures that do something with them. Usually one phone, passed back and forth.
The rule it is built on
Two sections, split by what the app does:
- Talk — the app hands you a prompt and gets out of the way.
- Play — the app is a participant. It times you, hides answers until a reveal, keeps score, or enforces turns.
Nothing appears in both. Where a body of content supports either reading, the mechanic splits rather than the writing: Overrated / Underrated is a swipe-and-argue deck in Talk and a scored head-to-head in Play, off one shared pool of content.
The games are structures
The prompts matter, but the mechanics are the product. Yes or No gives you a closed question, three seconds to read it while an outline draws itself around the card, then counts three · two · one — and you both answer out loud at the same instant. Nothing is ever tapped. Same Brain has you both say an answer at the same moment trying to land on the same word, with most prompts striking out the obvious answer, because “name the most romantic city” isn’t a game until Paris is ruled out.
Quiet on purpose
Mostly words on paper. No neon, no gradients, no mascot, no gamification furniture. Browsing surfaces are deliberately flat — an icon, a serif title, a sans subtitle, separated by space alone. Prompt cards are the one exception, because the card is the object you handle.
Every prompt ships inside the binary, so first launch, aeroplane mode and a dead server are all complete experiences. Nobody signs up to play; an account buys durability, never access.
Where it is
In development for iOS. Not on the App Store or TestFlight, and there is no Android or web version. Three of the five planned sections are still empty.
The landing page and waitlist are at us.jkos.me.