Reading a stranger's dilemma alone on your phone is a private hobby. Reading it to five people who then have to say which one of them thinks you were wrong is a game. This post is that game: 25 original scenarios, the four verdict words, two ways to score it, and the two rules that stop it turning into a real argument.
Every story is told by the person who did the thing, so you are not judging a villain. You are judging someone who arrived convinced they were fine.
Why "Am I the Asshole" Works Better Out Loud Than on Reddit
The format comes from r/AmItheAsshole, a subreddit founded in June 2013 where people post real conflicts and get judged. According to Wikipedia's entry on the subreddit, it had roughly 24.5 million members as of August 2026, and readers judge each post as YTA, NTA, NAH or ESH.
Online, you read the top comment and your instinct rearranges itself to match. In a room, nobody has read the comments. Six people hear the same minute of story and produce six different verdicts, and the interesting part is not the verdict. It is the moment someone says "wait, why is that obvious to you?" For why we hand our behaviour to strangers at all, we wrote why we ask strangers to judge us.
How to Run It: Rules, Roles, and Scoring
One person reads, everyone else votes, and the reader does not vote on their own story. Read the whole thing before anyone speaks, including the last sentence, because that is usually where the guilt is hiding.
Ridley's Games sells an "Am I The A**hole?" party game with 292 post cards for 3 to 8 players, ages 17 and up, at roughly 30 minutes a session. That range works read-aloud too: below eight, everyone stays accountable for their vote.
The four verdicts (NTA, YTA, ESH, NAH) and what they actually mean
NTA means not the asshole: you were fine, the other person was not. YTA means you were the one in the wrong. NAH means no assholes here, which covers two reasonable people wanting incompatible things. ESH means everyone sucks here, the verdict people forget exists.
Make ESH and NAH legal votes from the start. Allow only the two extremes and half the stories collapse into a shouting match about which side is worse. Most real conflicts are not one-sided, and games that drop the middle options get boring by story eight.
Two scoring modes: majority vote, or guess the percentage
Mode one, majority vote. Everyone votes at once on a count of three: one finger for NTA, two for YTA, three for ESH, four for NAH. Anyone in the minority gets 60 seconds to defend it. Nobody scores.
Mode two, guess the percentage. Before the vote, each player privately writes what share of the room will say YTA. Whoever is closest scores a point. It stops rewarding the loudest moralist and starts rewarding whoever reads the room accurately.
Either way, hold the votes until everyone has committed. In a PNAS estimation experiment, Lorenz and colleagues found that mild social influence narrows the diversity of a group's answers while raising everyone's confidence, without making the group more accurate. One confident person speaking first does not improve the verdict, it shrinks the disagreement you came for.
Ten Stories About Friends and Group Chats
1. The itemized bill. The table ordered two bottles of wine and three steaks. I had soup, paid only for my food, and the other five covered $22 more each.
2. The honest reference. A friend listed me as a reference for a job I did not think she could do. I answered the recruiter honestly, and she later learned why she was rejected.
3. The muted chat. I muted the wedding group chat in March and missed every decision. In July I told the bride her dress choice was unflattering, and she says I forfeited that right.
4. The thirty minute lie. A friend is late to everything by about 40 minutes, so for a year I told him events started half an hour early. Someone else finally told him.
5. The screenshot. A friend sent me a long message about her breakup. I pasted it into another group chat with her name removed, and someone recognized the details.
6. The plus one ban. One friend has brought her new boyfriend to every hangout since April, so I wrote "this one is just us" on my dinner invite. She has not replied since.
7. The better invite. I cancelled a friend's birthday dinner for a last minute show ticket and told her the real reason instead of inventing a stomach bug. She says the lie would have been kinder.
8. The loan with conditions. A friend asked me for $600 for rent and I have it. I said no, because he still owes someone else in our group $400 from last year.
9. The trip veto. One friend agreed to our house share only "if the plan stays loose," then booked a hotel two miles away. I told her not to come at all.
10. The birthday math. I have been to eleven group birthdays in three years and two people came to mine. I said so in the chat instead of quietly skipping the next gift collection.
Ten down, fifteen to go. If you would rather not read these off a screenshot, open BeJudge and let everyone vote before anyone argues.
Eight Stories About Family and Money
11. The inherited ring. My grandmother left me her ring, and my brother's fiancee has spent two years arguing it should go to whoever marries first. I got engaged last month and wear it now.
12. The subsidised sibling. My parents covered my sister's rent for three years while I worked through school paying my own. At their anniversary dinner I said the total out loud.
13. The family spreadsheet. I keep a record of what relatives have borrowed since 2021. When my uncle asked again I sent him the spreadsheet. He called it humiliating.
14. The holiday tax. I host every holiday and everyone brings one bottle of wine. This year I sent a shopping list with names next to items. Two relatives skipped it.
15. The will conversation. My mother told me privately how she is dividing her estate and asked me to keep it quiet. I told my brother, and she has not spoken to me since.
16. The car. My father left me his car and I sold it that month against a debt costing me interest daily. My stepmother says that told everyone what he was worth to me.
17. The baby shower budget. My cousin asked fifteen guests for $80 each toward a stroller. I gave $30 with a note explaining why, and she read it out loud to her mother.
18. The one who did the care. I cared for our mother for two years while my brother sent $200 a month. Now the house is selling and I want a larger share.
Seven Stories About Work, Weddings, and Neighbours
19. The salary leak. I earn $14,000 less than a colleague hired eight months after me, so I told the whole team what I make, which my contract forbids. Two are now negotiating.
20. The reply all. My manager criticized my work in an email copied to four people. I replied to all of them with a timeline showing the delay was hers.
21. The wedding no. I declined a destination wedding that would have cost me about $2,200 and told the couple the honest reason. They uninvited me from the local reception too.
22. The seating chart. I asked the couple not to seat me next to my ex and they said the chart was printed. At the reception I moved my place card two tables over.
23. The thank-you post. I gave a couple $150, and their group thank-you post listed what each guest gave. They said I was being precious when I asked them to take it down.
24. The 7 a.m. drill. My neighbour renovates from 7 a.m. on Saturdays, which is legal here. I run my treadmill above his bedroom at 6 a.m., which is also legal.
25. The driveway camera. After two cars were scratched I installed a camera covering the shared driveway. It also captures my neighbour's front door, and I refused to angle it away.
For a longer and heavier follow-up set, try real life moral dilemmas to debate with friends.
The Two Rules That Keep It a Game
No real names. The moment someone reads a story about a person in the room, the votes stop being about the story and people start voting to protect a friendship. Use the numbered scenarios, or write new ones with the details filed off.
No open cases. Do not bring a conflict you are currently in. AITA works as a game because the outcome is already settled and nothing said tonight changes it. A live dispute turns six friends into an unqualified jury, and somebody always leaves upset.
Both rules exist for the same reason: the fun is in disagreeing safely.
What to Do When the Room Splits 50/50
A clean split is the best outcome, so do not rush to break it. Ask each side for the single fact that would flip their vote. Half the time nobody can name one, which is itself the finding.
That state has a name. A 2023 study in Memory and Cognition describes moral dumbfounding as holding a moral judgment even when you cannot produce a reason for it, and found it in Chinese, Indian and MENA samples, not only Western ones. When your friend says "I just think it is wrong" and stops, that is the phenomenon, not a failure of argument.
This is where AITA differs from a plain dilemma set. Our post on you be the judge scenarios gives situations with no verdict attached. AITA hands you a specific narrator, four verdict words and a percentage to guess, and the narrator is the point: everything you hear is filtered through someone defending themselves.
Writing Your Own AITA Stories That Actually Divide People
Three things make a scenario split a room. Write it in first person and let the narrator sound reasonable, because a story that indicts itself has no game in it. Give both sides one concrete cost: money, time, or a relationship. Keep it under 60 seconds of reading.
Stack two domains rather than one. In a study mapping 100,000 threads from the subreddit, Nguyen and colleagues sorted them into 47 topics and five meta-categories and found most dilemmas combine at least two, family and money being a common pair. "My sister borrowed money" is a shrug. "My sister borrowed money for a wedding I was not invited to" is an argument.
Then test it. If your first three readers all vote the same way inside five seconds, the story is a fable, not a dilemma. Change one number until it hurts.
Twenty five stories is a good night. Doing it with a scoreboard is better. Open BeJudge or grab it on the App Store, read the dilemma out loud, and everyone votes before anyone argues.
FAQ
How do you play the AITA game with friends?
One person reads a scenario out loud from the narrator's point of view, then everyone votes at the same time on a count of three. Use four options: NTA, YTA, ESH and NAH. After the vote, anyone in the minority gets a minute to defend their position, and then you move to the next story.
What do NTA, YTA, ESH and NAH mean?
NTA is not the asshole, YTA is you're the asshole, ESH is everyone sucks here, and NAH is no assholes here. They come from r/AmItheAsshole, where readers use them to judge posts. Keeping all four available matters, because most real conflicts fall into the middle two rather than the extremes.
How many people do you need for an AITA game night?
Three is the practical minimum, since you need a reader plus enough voters to produce a split. Around eight is the upper limit before people start voting to agree with whoever spoke first. The commercial card version of the genre is built for 3 to 8 players, which is a reasonable range to copy.
What makes a good AITA scenario?
Both sides have to be defensible, and the narrator has to sound reasonable while describing what they did. Add a concrete cost on each side, keep it under a minute of reading, and combine two domains such as family and money. If everyone votes the same way instantly, the scenario is too clean.
Is there an app for playing AITA with friends?
BeJudge runs the same loop on a phone: you read a real-life dilemma, you give your verdict, and then you see how everyone else voted. It is available at bejudge.com and on the App Store, so nobody has to pick the stories or read them off a screenshot.