Add These Awesome Online Games to Your Nightly Virtual Game Lineup
Since homebody orders started in California in March, a group of friends and I have had a virtual night of gaming on Saturday night. I think the first week we played we ended up just playing fake versions of Cards Against Humanity and Pictionary, but every week we added a new game or two to the game.
It was surprisingly difficult to find new games. While there are hundreds of online versions of everything from Yahtzee to Monopoly, finding a version that isn’t worth the bundle that you can play with your real friends rather than random people is a bit of a daunting task.
If you’re also stuck in the nighttime rut of Cards Against Humanity and Pictionary, here are a few more options I’ve tested over the past few weeks. Found something awesome that I haven’t mentioned? Tell us what you are playing in the comments.
Codenames
I never heard of Codenames until a friend suggested it to our group, but the idea behind the game is pretty simple. Divide your group of friends into two teams: red and blue. You usually play with real cards, but in this virtual experience, you are about to go to this site . You will create a unique URL for your team so that everyone has the same game card.
One person on each team becomes the “espionage master” they are going to click on the “espionage master” button in the lower right corner of the page, which will show them which cards are red and which are blue.
The game is played by each team’s top spies who try to give their team a single word and number clue to help them guess the words on the screen that match their color. So you can say “Russia, 2” for someone to guess Moscow and Europe in the screenshot above.
The turn ends if your team chooses the wrong word from the other team, or one of the many neutral words on the screen. There’s also a death word: if either team chooses, it’s game over.
It took us a round or two to figure it out, but then he became one of our group’s favorites. If my instructions were too complicated to follow here, here is a video from some guy explaining how to play the card version:
Jackbox Games
At the start of the pandemic, a friend recommended Quiplash to me, a proposal that I hadn’t listened to until last week. I wish I had earlier.
You probably know Jackbox Games from the You Don’t Know Jack quiz. In fact, the company has tons of games that it sells in packs called party packs . Last week we started with Party Pack 3 and this week I bought Party Pack 6 to add to the mix because we had a lot of fun.
Each package includes five different games. In a normal world, you would put a game on your TV and then your friends would use their phones as controllers. With virtual gameplay, everything works pretty much the same. You download the game to your computer and show the screen to your friends. They connect to your particular game through the Jackbox website using a four-digit code.
It’s very easy, even if your friends may have had a beer before you start playing.
Our favorites are Trivia Murder Party, a quiz game in which you play mini-games when you ask the wrong question, and Tee KO, where you create T-shirts and have them fight each other face to face. There is also a game where you come up with cruise ship jokes, another murder mystery-style game in which you try to figure out which of your friends is an alien, and a game where you come up with crazy definitions for fake words.
All games take 20 minutes or less and we didn’t hate any of them. Last week, we actually ended up playing only games made with Jackbox, which turned into a 5 hour game night. They are really funny.
Party kits are not free, but they are cheap. Only one person has to buy one (the person who is going to share their screen) and prices for the 6 available packages range from $ 12.49 to $ 20.99. It’s not a huge investment, and you get 5 games for less than what you would probably pay if you won the round at the bar.
Dice games
Almost any dice game can be played online. Some friends and I love to play Quixx when we are in bars and we did a lot of video chat just using our own dice and scoreboards.
I played Yahtzee several times using an online dice roller like this and one buddy with a physical tally sheet who keeps score for everyone and we also played Pass the Pigs using the online pig roller and counting sheet of the house.
Dice games are for the most part very easy to implement, especially if one of your homes has physical score sheets that can be tracked for everyone, or if you can find an online version of a score sheet for your favorite dice game. …
Scribble
You may have already found it in your quest, but we all really enjoyed playing Scribble . It is essentially a fake Pictionary. The site makes it very easy to create a room just for your friends and automate the process of determining whose turn it is to play.
The game offers word suggestions (you can choose between three), and you can also enter your own jokes and other jokes so that they appear as possible choices.
My favorite part of this is people guess by typing their answer, which means you don’t have to figure out which of your friend’s voices first shouted out the correct answer with Zoom. The game also keeps score, and if you feel lonely on a non-playing night, you can also play with strangers through the site.