What Happens Next
What Happens Next is a game in which performers build an improvised story or scene through a series of offers, with a coach or host prompting each new development by asking "What happens next?" Each offer is accepted, echoed, and built upon before the next prompt arrives. The game trains offer acceptance, narrative momentum, and the collective instinct to advance rather than stall a story.
Structure
Setup
The full ensemble or a designated group of performers begin an improvised adventure or story. A coach or host stands outside the playing space. The performers receive a starting point (a location, a character, or a situation) and begin building the world.
Gameplay
James Mark in Creating Improvised Theatre documents the mechanics: when any actor makes an offer (a narrative suggestion or action), all the other actors shout "Yes!" and echo the offer aloud, affirming it as the shared reality. The coach then asks "What happens next?" and another actor makes the next offer, which advances the story. Each offer is again affirmed by the group before the next prompt arrives.
This call-and-response structure creates collective authorship: no single performer controls the narrative, and each offer is immediately ratified by the ensemble before the story continues. The coach's repeated question creates a rhythm that drives the story forward, preventing performers from dwelling in any single moment.
In the audience-directed version, audience members call out suggestions at each "What happens next?" prompt, and performers execute them with full commitment. This variant makes the game more explicitly performative: the audience becomes a co-author whose directives the performers must interpret and justify in real time.
Katie Goodman in Improvisation for the Spirit names the game and frames it around flexibility: "All improv games require flexibility. There's a game called, simply enough, 'What Happens Next.'" Goodman presents the game as a vehicle for the core improv skill of adapting to unexpected material.
Debrief
After the game, players discuss the offers: which ones moved the story forward versus which ones restated or stalled the existing narrative. The debrief focuses on the difference between an offer that advances (adding new information or consequence) and one that merely elaborates.
How to Teach It
How to Explain It
"We are building a story together. I start with a setup. Then I say: 'And then...' and point to someone. That person adds the next moment. Then we all say 'Yes!' together, and they say 'And then...' and point to someone else. Keep the story moving forward. No blocking, no reversals. Just what happens next."
Objectives
What Happens Next develops two related skills. The first is offer acceptance: the ensemble affirmation ("Yes!") and echo make the acceptance of offers explicit and physical, training the yes-and reflex as a collective rather than individual habit. The second is narrative drive: the repeated question enforces the most fundamental storytelling principle, which is that stories must advance. Performers who restall, over-explain, or fail to add new information become visible failures of the game's central rule.
Scaffolding
Begin with the coach-prompted ensemble version before introducing audience direction. This allows performers to develop facility with the game's structure (offer, affirmation, echo, prompt) without the additional cognitive load of interpreting audience suggestions.
For groups that struggle to make offers (waiting for others to initiate), add a time limit to each prompt: performers have five seconds to respond to "What happens next?" before the coach prompts again. This prevents hesitation from becoming habitual.
Common Coaching Notes
- "Say 'Yes' like you mean it. The echo tells everyone this just happened."
- "What happens next? Don't repeat what just happened. Move the story."
- "If you don't know what happens next, say something anyway. The group will follow."
- "Advance. The story only goes forward."
How to Perform It
The game works as performance primarily in its audience-directed version, where audience members supply the answers to "What happens next?" and performers execute them. The entertainment value comes from the contrast between the audience's suggestions and the performers' ability to justify and commit to them.
The most effective performance moments arise when a suggestion seems impossible to execute and the performer finds an unexpected but satisfying justification. Suggestions that are merely "unusual" produce less interesting performance than suggestions that create genuine staging or logical challenges.
The coach or host in this game has significant influence on pacing. Questions asked too quickly do not give performers time to commit to the current offer before the next arrives; questions asked too slowly create dead moments between story beats. The host must read the room and time the prompts to maintain the scene's momentum while allowing performers to develop each offer.
History
James Mark in Creating Improvised Theatre documents What Happens Next as a structured ensemble game in which the recurring coach prompt drives collective storytelling. Mark's version foregrounds the "Yes" response as an ensemble commitment mechanism, creating a group norm of acceptance before each story development.
Katie Goodman in Improvisation for the Spirit names the game and frames it within the broader improv principle of flexibility, presenting it as a direct training tool for adaptive response to unexpected offers.
The underlying structure of the game connects to foundational improv principles articulated across the tradition. The repeated prompt "What happens next?" externalizes the narrative question that performers are implicitly answering in all story-based improvisation: the game makes the question explicit and collective, giving each performer an equal invitation to advance the narrative.
Worth Reading
See all books →
Creating Improvised Theatre
Tools, Techniques, and Theories
Mark Jane
The Improv Handbook
The Ultimate Guide to Improvising in Comedy, Theatre, and Beyond
Tom Salinsky; Deborah Frances-White
Acting Through Improv
Improv Through Theatresports
Lynda Belt; Rebecca Stockley
The Upright Citizens Brigade Comedy Improvisation Manual
Matt Besser; Ian Roberts; Matt Walsh
Embodied Playwriting
Improv and Acting Exercises for Writing
Hillary Haft Bucs; Charissa Menefee
Improve
How I Discovered Improv Comedy and Conquered Social Anxiety
Alex Graudins
Related Games
Game-O-Matic
Game-O-Matic is a meta-improv game in which the audience suggests rules, constraints, or elements that are combined to create a brand-new game on the spot. The performers must figure out and play the invented game in real time. The game rewards adaptability and the ability to find playable structure in arbitrary constraints.
Typewriter
Typewriter is a long-form game in which one performer sits as a writer working on a book or story while the ensemble acts out the narrative being written. The author provides the narration and can edit, delete, rewind, or redirect the action at will. The game combines narrative authority with ensemble adaptability, and rewards both editorial precision from the author and immediate responsiveness from the cast.
Verses
Verses is a musical improv game in which performers trade improvised song verses on a given topic, each verse building on or responding to the previous one. The alternating structure creates a musical conversation that develops through successive exchanges, with each performer advancing the song's argument, narrative, or emotional arc. The game rewards lyrical creativity, melodic consistency, and the ability to support a partner's musical choices.
Before or After
Before or After is a short-form game in which performers present a scene, then the audience calls out whether they want to see what happened "before" or "after" the events just depicted. The performers create a new scene that logically connects to the original, revealing backstory or consequences that recontextualize what the audience already witnessed. The game can cycle through multiple rounds, with the audience driving the story forward or backward in time. Before or After trains narrative construction, temporal awareness, and the ability to expand a story in either direction while maintaining internal consistency. The game rewards performers who plant details in early scenes that pay off when the timeline shifts.
Narrator
Narrator is a short-form game in which one performer serves as an omniscient narrator who describes and directs the action while other players act out whatever is narrated. The performers must physicalize the narrator's words instantly, even when the descriptions become absurd, contradictory, or physically challenging. The game generates comedy from the tension between what is narrated and what the performers can actually do, and from the narrator's power to control the scene's reality with a single sentence. The game rewards quick physical commitment from the actors and creative, descriptive language from the narrator.
Bucket
Bucket is a short-form game in which scene suggestions, character traits, or constraints are written on slips of paper and placed in a bucket before the show. During scenes, performers draw slips at designated moments and must immediately incorporate whatever is written into the ongoing action. The random elements inject controlled unpredictability, forcing performers to accept and justify offers that could not be anticipated. The game rewards flexibility, quick thinking, and the ability to absorb any suggestion without hesitation. Bucket demonstrates the core improv principle that accepting external offers, no matter how disruptive, produces stronger and more surprising scene work than relying solely on performer-generated choices.
How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). What Happens Next. Retrieved March 17, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/games/what-happens-next
The Improv Archive. "What Happens Next." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/games/what-happens-next.
The Improv Archive. "What Happens Next." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/games/what-happens-next. Accessed March 17, 2026.
The Improv Archive is a systemically maintained repository. The archive itself acts as the corporate author.