🌱 How to Play Mimic Party - Complete Rules Guide

Everyone at the table hears the same reference sound, then all players record their imitation at the same time on one shared countdown. You get one take — there is no re-record. Each take plays back for the whole table, the AI scores it out of 100 on the spot, and a wheel spins between rounds handing out bonuses, multipliers and sabotages. A game runs about ten minutes — roughly four rounds — for one to five players online, and the whole thing is played with your voice.

The developer describes a round as a fixed six-step loop on the official site, and every round you will ever play follows it exactly:

• The reference sound plays — the whole table hears the same clip once. References are picked at random across the packs you own; animals, machines, voices and more come with the base game.
• One countdown starts and every player records at the same time. There is no turn order during recording.
• You imitate the sound with your voice — one take, no second chance.
• Takes play back one by one while everyone else stays muted.
• The AI scores each take out of 100, right after it plays, in front of everybody.
• The wheel spins for the whole table at once, and the next round begins.

The things that ruin first games are almost never the rules — they are mic trouble, language mix and missing packs. Run this checklist before the host hits start:

• A microphone is required. The official requirements say it plainly: the whole game is played with your voice.
• Wear headphones. The game strongly recommends them, and launch-window reviewers confirm why — game audio leaking into your mic can get picked up and scored.
• Join or host a same-language lobby. At launch the lobbies skew heavily French, and mixed-language rooms are where most bad sessions start. Bring friends if you can.
• Make sure everyone at the table has the same sound packs installed. The lobby tells you exactly who is still downloading — wait for it.
• Keep the official Discord handy. The developers are active there, and it is where Playtest keys drop first.

The official slogan is the whole culture of the game in three lines: "Imitate a sound with your voice. One take. No second chance. AI scores how close you got. Your friends decide how much they laughed." There is no re-record button, no retry, no vote. Commit to your first instinct, hold nothing back, and accept the result — a brave, spectacular miss is worth more at this table than a safe mumble, because the audience is the point.

Every take is scored out of 100 on three dimensions: Melody, Rhythm and Attacks. Melody is compared in relative pitch — your register never counts against you, so a deep voice and a high voice tracing the same curve score the same. Rhythm tracks where your beats fall. Attacks counts your vocal onsets across the take: one bark does not pass for three. Timbre — how similar you sound — is deliberately ignored, and so is the microphone you bought. All of it runs locally on your machine, not in the cloud, and there is no player voting system. The exact weighting of the three dimensions has not been published; our scoring deep dive covers what is confirmed.

Between rounds the wheel spins for everyone at once, and it can land on three kinds of results: bonus points, multipliers and sabotages. The five confirmed sabotage effects are saturation, echo, pitch shift, chopped audio and the fart swap — the last one replaces your entire next take with a garbage sound, so the table hears that instead of your voice. Sabotage is aimed: whoever spins it picks a victim, the effect lands on that player's next take, and it costs them points on top. You only find out who aimed at you when your take plays. Wheel values and multiplier tiers have not been published — treat any specific numbers you see online as community guesses.

Mimic Party supports one to five players online, and the official pacing is about ten minutes a game — roughly four rounds. The host can change the round count in the lobby, though launch-window reviews call the options "way too limited" and put the cap at seven rounds; both the official pacing and the community-measured cap are true at the same time, so plan accordingly. Going alone works technically — Steam tags the game Singleplayer — but the system requirements describe online multiplayer only (2-5 players), so treat solo as rehearsal. There is no local same-screen mode, and a broadband connection is required throughout.