Everything the link does, screen by screen

It helps to think of a POOK invitation as one URL with three states. Fourteen days before the start it becomes an RSVP page. Between the start time and the end time it becomes a live room, if the invitation is paid. Two hours after the end it closes, and what is left is a recap for you and nothing identifiable for anyone else. This page walks through each state from the screen the guest actually sees.

What does the guest see, step by step?

1. The card. They tap the link or scan the QR. The invitation renders exactly as you built it — same renderer as the studio preview, so nothing shifts between your screen and theirs.
2. The nickname. To answer, they pick a temporary nickname of 2–16 characters, unique within that one invitation, and a gender option. That is the entire identity: no login, no phone number, no email.
3. The answer. Three buttons — attending, still deciding, can’t make it — plus an optional note to the host of up to 120 characters, kept only on an attending answer and never shown in the aggregate recap.
4. The calendar. A Google Calendar link (which survives in-app browsers like KakaoTalk) or an .ics download with alarms at −24 hours and −2 hours.
5. The door, if you use one. You can issue a live-door QR and an entry code; guests scan with the camera or type the code, and there is a fallback when the camera is blocked.
6. The day. On a paid invitation, returning to the same link between the start and end time opens the live room described below.

A guest can change their answer at any time. A still-deciding answer that is still standing 24 hours before the start counts as a decline in your numbers and releases the seat it was holding — the stored answer itself is never rewritten, it is simply read differently once the deadline passes.

What do you see as the host?

The studio shows a per-guest row — nickname, chosen response, effective response, check-in status, timestamp and note — plus aggregate RSVP counts. During the gathering you can moderate live: hide a chat message, remove a participant photo, or block an admitted participant, which releases their seat and bars that device.

What is inside the live room?

• Group chat scoped to the invitation, 1–300 characters per message, deleted 48 hours after the gathering.
• Play Kit — 32 activities grouped four ways: quick, with the body, conversation, and memory. Up to 8 of them can be pinned to one invitation’s shelf.
• Photo gallery — WebP with a JPEG fallback, 800 KB per file, 30 photos per session, served through signed URLs with EXIF and location metadata stripped.
• Rooms and tables that participants open and join themselves during the day — ad hoc, not a seating chart.
• Mood Pulse for anonymous mood reactions and Moment Room for shared prompt cards you can reshuffle.
• Memory Capsule — one sentence of up to 280 characters that is visible only to the guest who wrote it. You see a count, never the text.
• Votes with anonymous aggregate results and live tallies hidden from other participants, and connection tickets for a private 1:1 exchange while at the same table.
• POOK Daycard — a 9:16 card the guest generates on their own screen from the day’s mood and their own sentence.

The games themselves range from Balance Pick, Liar Room and Taboo to Bingo, air hockey, a flag quiz and a music quiz with 13 genres plus an all-genres option. A few have defined player counts — Liar Room 3–10, Taboo 2–10, Mafia card dealer 4–10, Old Maid 2–6 — and the rest simply run with whoever is there. Games, prompts and the guest interface are localized in all eight languages, not only the marketing pages.

Which of this is free?

The free invitation covers the first two rows of the guest walkthrough and stops before the live room: card, RSVP with note, calendar save, link and QR, watermark shown, and a Play Kit shelf you can look at but not play together. Realtime play, chat, rooms, memories and the recap open on a paid invitation, as do AI drafting, the full template library and the Dress Rehearsal preview that shows you the participant screen before anyone else sees it. One Day is $1.49 for a single invitation; the subscription tiers and the +30-guest add-on are set out on the pricing page. If you are choosing a design first, the template gallery is the other half of this story.

What POOK deliberately does not do

There is no CSV or spreadsheet export of the RSVP list, no broadcast or announcement tool, and no reminders sent by POOK — the .ics alarms are the substitute. There is no contact import or address book, no plus-one or meal-choice field, no seating chart or assigned tables at publish time, no ticketing or guest payments, no registry, no native app and no calendar sync for the host. If your event needs any of those as a hard requirement, POOK will frustrate you. If what you need is one link that works on any phone, read how RSVP tracking works for a small party, compare the approach on the Partiful page, or start from the home page and publish something small first. Short answers to the rest live on the FAQ.