Message in a Bottle
A shoreline that lives in your voice. Walk an imagined shore where the tide brings in glass bottles — each one carrying a short note from a stranger somewhere out there — and where your own words can drift to someone you will never meet, on a day they may really need them.
How to play — full commands & tutorial
What it is
Message in a Bottle is not a game — it is a gentle social shore, designed blind-first and played entirely by talking. There is nothing to win and nobody to beat. There is only the sea, the sound of waves and shore birds, and bottles: real messages, written by real players, sealed in glass and set drifting. You choose one by its look, hear the cork and the paper, and listen to the note inside. Writers are anonymous, always — the most you will ever hear is a vague tag the writer chose themselves, like a coast or a country. Your real location is never asked and never shared.
What you do on the shore
- Find bottles — the waves set three bottles at your feet, each described by its colour, its cork, its wax seal. Open up to 20 a day.
- Reply across the water — answer a bottle’s writer, anonymously. Your reply washes up for them on their next visit. Reply to up to 5 a day — and if a reply finds you, you can answer it once, and that bottle’s journey is complete.
- Toss your own — dictate a message, hear it read back, seal it with your thumbs-up, and let it drift. Toss up to 3 a day. Every message carries at least five words — a bottle should say something.
- A sea that stays kind — nothing human-written floats unreviewed. Every bottle and reply passes an automatic filter, then waits for the keeper — a human moderator who reads and approves it before anyone else hears it. Anything with personal details, contact invitations, or cruelty is refused before it is ever stored.
- Report what shouldn’t be here — hear a bottle that slipped through? Say “report.” One report marks a bottle; two, from different players, pull it out of the sea until the keeper rules on it.
- Calm limits — daily counts, a gentle start for new writers, a short wait between tosses, and no sending the same words twice keep the ocean from filling with spam.
How to play
When Message in a Bottle launches, open it on any Alexa device by saying “Alexa, open Message in a Bottle.” Then just talk: “find bottles,” “reply,” “toss a bottle,” “my shore.” One thing to know before your first message: when you dictate, you begin with the opener words — “my message is…” or “my reply is…” — so Alexa catches every word. The full how-to-play page teaches them, and everything else.
Coming soon. Message in a Bottle is the fourth title from Earshot Worlds and its first social skill. Follow the blind Dad on Facebook for the launch announcement.