A New Look: Spice Up Is a Box of Cards Now

Updates · Updated 19 September 2026

If you opened Spice Up this week, it looks different. Not a little different: the whole thing has been redrawn. Same games, same words, same rules. Here is why we did it, and what you will find has moved.

It looked like everything else

The old Spice Up was frosted glass panels on a black background, a pink-to-purple gradient on every button, glowing outlines, a dial for the heat. If that sounds familiar, it is because it was the look of every app made in a hurry in 2026, and we made ours in a hurry too. It was the default, the thing you get when you ask for "a dark app with a pink accent" and take what comes back.

A friend put it more bluntly. She said it looked like a machine had made it. She was not wrong about the look. Nothing on the screen said what the app actually is, which is a game you play in a room with people you like, phone in the middle, everyone leaning in. It could have been a crypto wallet.

So we asked what it actually is

The answer was sitting in the name of the first game we ever wrote. Spice Up is a box of cards. Every game is a deck. Every prompt is a card dealt from it. The safe word is something you would write on a scrap of paper and tape to the table. Once we had that one picture, every other decision made itself.

• The table is felt. Dark, warm, with a bit of texture. Not black glass.
• The cards are cream, with dark ink. A card's heat is printed on it as flames, so you can see what you have been dealt without reading the dial.
• Every game is a tuck box on a shelf. Each has its own colour, and its cards carry that colour on their backs.
• The type is the type on a box of cards. Big, heavy capitals for names and buttons. Plain, readable text for the card itself.
• Handwriting only where a person would write. The safe word on its tag. Whose turn is up next. The little "or" between two options. Never on a button.
• Cards are dealt. They slide off the deck and turn over. When the app draws a name, the card goes face down and comes back up with the name on it, in about a second.

Three games have new names

Two of the games were built as slot machines, and a third put your chosen games "in a bowl". None of that makes sense on a table of cards, so they have been renamed for what they show now.

Spin is Deal, everywhere. Old links still land on the right game.

What did not change

Everything that matters. Every card, truth, dare, question and dilemma is the same. The four levels are the same and still deal only the level you pick. Limits, caps and who plays with whom work exactly as before. The safe word is agreed before anything starts and stays on screen the whole night. Nothing you type leaves your phone.

Things we fixed on the way

• Every deal lands inside a second. The old slot machines made you watch them spin for two.
• The quick setup asks for gender and who each player is into, so a room can be set up properly in one go.
• Long words fit on their cards. "Collarbone" no longer breaks in half.
• A tall card scrolls under the slip that announces the next deck instead of losing its head.

If something looks off

We redrew every screen and tested every game on a phone and a laptop, but you are the ones holding it on a Friday night. Under every dealt card is a small Flag. Tap it, tap what is wrong, and it comes straight to us with the card and how the room was set up. The contact form on the shelf reaches us too.

Deal something tonight.