Fun Games for an Online Happy Hour
Are you tired of boring video calls? Well, no longer!
After years of online groups and happy hours, I’ve built up a big list of fun games and activities that you can do on a video call.
Now that I have my blog, I want to share this list publicly so that I can reference it in the future.
There’s a few major groups of activities:
Free Websites
These websites allow you to play as a private group, so you are playing just with other players from your call.
Pictionary and Telephone
Gartic.io is a great implementation of classic pictionary game. In this game, one person is the “drawer”. They draw a secret word and the other players compete to guess what the word is. The earlier you guess correctly, the more points you get.
The drawing interface is pretty good. And there are a bunch of great word categories to try.
But there’s also GarticPhone, which supports the Telephone-style of pictionary. This variant has each person draw a word. Their drawing then goes to another player, who has to guess what the drawing is!
Hilarity ensues as you try to decipher your friends drawings.
Note that this plays best with larger groups, ideally 6-10 people.
Haxball Soccer
Haxball is an online soccer game, where your group splits up into two teams to try to score goals against each other.
This game works best when you have 6-10 people.
The Wiki Game
The Wiki Game is a spin on 5 Clicks to Jesus, also known as Wikiracing. In the game, you get a pair of Wikipedia pages. Players compete to see who can navigate from the first wiki page to the second, only by clicking links on the page.
For example, everyone starts on the page “Palace of Whitehall”. Then, everyone tries to get to the page Genghis Khan, only by clicking links to other wikipedia pages.
The one annoying thing about thewikigame.com’s implementation is that you
can’t use the back button if you make a mistake. But it does make up for it by
tracking the path of pages you took and assigning a score.
Scategories
This online implementation of Scategories is a nicely built UI to help you run this classic party game as a private group.
Scategories is a brain-burning party game, where each person competes to think of things that match a category and start with a particular letter. For example, countries that start with the letter M: Macedonia, Montenegro, Mongolia, etc.
You get points for how many things you thought up and how unique the things you though of are!
Codenames
Codenames is a more recent hit board game. You split up into 2 teams. Each team has a “spymaster” that gives hints to which spaces on a 5x5 grid are for your team. Then, the players compete to pick the right spaces to win.
horsepaste.com is a nice, minimalistic, but very smooth online implementation of the game that works great on video calls.
Do note that you need at least 4 people to play though.
Setacular
Setacular (previously known as ISASET) is an online puzzle game, where you compete to find a set of 3 cards in a grid that are either all the same or all different along 4 characteristics: color, amount, shape, and fill.
This one is calm, but tense, as you each stare at the same cards for what seems like an eternity until a set suddenly jumps out at you.
This game works better in smaller groups, like 3-5 at most.
Krunker
Krunker is a fast-paced, first person shooter game that you can play online. To play in a private group, everyone needs to be logged in. But you don’t need to provide an email to do so. And signup takes seconds.
Timeline
WikiTrivia is an online version of the boardgame timeline. In the game, you try to place events in chronological order, getting harder and harder as the gaps in time get shorter with more events.
The game’s novelty wears off quickly unless your group are hardcore history buffs. But it is a quick, fun game, maybe as a teaser while getting started or waiting for people to join the call.
Geoguessr
Geoguesser is a geography brain burner, where you get dropped somewhere randomly on the earth and have to guess where you are using only your surroundings.
Use context clues, navigate around, and find every little detail to help you narrow down where on the earth you are. Ultimately, you get points for how close your guess is to the correct location.
This one requires a login, but it is free to sign up.
Board Games
The following board games are easy to play on a video call. Though, I’m skipping any games that have good online versions listed above.
Boggle
Boggle uses a 4x4 grid of letter dice. After shaking the dice to randomize the board, players have a limited time to list as many words that they can make using the letters on the board.
If you have a boggle set, the host can point their camera at it. Or you can use an online board like this one.
Otherwise, playing works normally. The host reveals the board to the group and then everyone writes down everything they can see. Once the time is up, check and score each player’s words according to the rules.
So this one is extra great, because (unlike the other most board games listed in this section) you don’t really even need a copy of the game to play.
Trivial Pursuit & Other Trivia Games
Trivial Pursuit is a classic board game, where you have to answer one question from 6 different categories to win. Each turn you roll a die and move along a circular board where spaces correspond to different colored question categories.
To make this work on a call, one person serves as the trivia master, asking the questions and reading the responses. Replace the board with some other mechanism of randomly picking a category. Otherwise, play works as normal.
Balderdash
In Balderdash, the group is presented with a seemingly nonsense word. Each player then comes up with a fake dictionary definition of the what they think the word could mean. These are then mixed in with the real definition.
Players then vote on which definition is correct. You get 2 points for guessing the correct definition and one point for each other player that thinks your definition is the right one.
A Role Playing Game
Enter a world of fantasy and adventure by playing an RPG together! Either play a classic like DnD or Pathfinder. To get started, look for a one-shot adventure that you can play in one session. These usually feature pre-created characters and a short, quick-to-play adventure scenario that is easy for beginners.
Alternatively, you can look for a one-page RPG. These are standalone games that focus specifically on creating a great one session game.
For example, in Honey Heist you play as a criminal bear. Every action either uses your bear stat or your criminal stat.
There’s tons of these games out there. They’re often pretty eccentric. And they usually either free or pretty cheap, like a couple dollars to download.
Diplomacy
Diplomacy is a brutal game of sweet talking and backstabbing. You play as one of 7 countries in Europe during World War 1.
Each turn, you move your units one space, taking territory and battling each other. However, each unit is equal and to take a territory, you need to beat your opponent by one. So capturing territory often requires you to team up with another player.
This slow pace and need to team up leads to very tense and deceptive negotiation each turn with players. Alliances form and are broken. Backs are stabbed.
If your group is emotionally mature enough to handle this level of brutality, it is a really fun game. Look up “gunboat diplomacy” for a good ruleset that forces the game to move more quickly.
Werewolf / Mafia
Werewolf / Mafia is a party game for 8-16 people, where the town works together to try to root out the mafia among them. Meanwhile, the mafia conspire to kill the townfolk before they are discovered.
Here is a good video explaining the rules, ignore where it says 12-16 though. I’ve played with as few as 6 and had a good time.
The only thing you need to play this game on a video call is the ability to privately message people. At the beginning of the game, the moderator should make a small group chat for the mafia members. Otherwise, the game proceeds normally.
If you would like a nice box set of Werewolf, One Night Ultimate Werewolf is a good choice. It also includes a bunch of extra game modes and special characters that you can replace different roles with.
Paid Video Games
Of course, there are tons of online multiplayer video games. If your group is already setup to play online together, then you probably don’t need this list of ideas in the first place.
But if your group isn’t full of “gamers”, there are still a few good options that are accessible to most people, regardless of gamer-iness.
Jackbox Games
Jackbox Games is a series of party game suites that have a ton of variety and are pre-built to work online. Only one person has to purchase the game. They act as the host, and everyone else connects to the game through website on their phone.
There’s not much to say here other than this game was designed specifically for this use case: online party games. The actual game is a series of minigame challenges, where the minigames depend on which version of Jackbox you bought.
Fall Guys
The 2020’s brough a whole host of free-to-play online multiplayer games. Among these, Fall Guys is a great casual party game. The best part is that you can join as a group, and the game will place your entire party together in the same game. Though, you each still compete seperately for the crown.
There are a lot of games like this in the first-person-shooter genre: Fortnite, Overwatch 2, Valorant, the Finals, and so on.
However, for casual play with a non-Gamer group, Fall Guys is much more approachable.
But do note, that people will need a PC or game console to play. And, it will take a while for people to get setup if they aren’t ready. So if you plan on doing this, definitely spread the word ahead of time so everyone comes ready to play.
Minecraft
Minecraft is a classic at this point. Almost everyone seems to have a copy lying around somewhere.
If someone in your group is tech-saavy, they can setup a private minecraft server for you all to join and have fun building and adventuring together.
This makes for a nice casual chat, where you can all just hang out and shoot the breeze while playing this relaxing classic game.
Classic Party Games
These classics are good filler or backup options. Keep in mind though that you get out what you put in. Since these are less structured that the other games, it helps if you take it seriously and give some pomp and circumstance to make it more engaging.
Name That Tune
There’s no particular website or setup needed for this one. Just pull up any music service like Youtube, Apple Music, Spotify, etc. And play random popular songs.
You could make it a game by splitting up into teams and competing by who guesses first or gets the most correct.
Alternatively, play clips from popular TV shows or movies. Or you could show famous pieces of art.
21 Questions
Someone thinks of an person, place or thing. Everyone else then has 21 questions to find out what the answer is.
Charades
In Charades, you split up into pairs and pick a category, ex. Animals. Write out a bunch of things in that category and set them aside. Then, one member of each pair gets randomly assigned a secret from that category.
While a timer is running, they then have to act out that animal without saying that it is. The other person shouts out guesses until they get the right answer or the time runs out.
If they get the right answer, they get a point. First team to 10 points wins.