Multiplayer Games For Your Next Game Night
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By Xinran Yuan
Looking to get competitive during your next club social or call with friends? Look no further — Flyby’s rounded up some multiplayer games perfect for trying out during your next Zoom call. You and your friends may be scattered across different time zones and worried about catching coronavirus, but at least these games are here to help you catch up and stay sane.
2-12 players
If you haven’t played Skribbl.io yet, you’ve been missing out! Make a private room and get a bunch of your friends to join. You’ll take turns getting a word and drawing a picture for it, guessing what your friends’ drawings are supposed to be, and laughing a lot when the drawings are, uh, bad. There’s also support for custom words, so you can build your own deck of words to draw from.
4-10 players
To play Among Us for free, everyone will need to download the app on a phone or tablet. The premise is that all players are a team completing tasks to run a spaceship. One player, however, is actually an Imposter whose goal is to ruin the mission. While everyone runs around doing tasks, the Imposter will kill crewmates, sabotage ship technology, and try to keep their identity hidden. Crew members are tasked with keeping the ship running and figuring out who the Imposter is before it’s too late.
1+ players
This is a beautiful web app for playing the classic card game Set, and one of its developers is Harvard’s very own Eric K. Zhang ’23. In Set, cards display groups of shapes that may come in different numbers or colors. You compete to be the quickest to find triplets of cards satisfying certain rules. This may sound vague, but once you get into it, it’s hard to stop playing!
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4+ players
Players are split into two opposing spy teams. Each team has four keywords they use to send encrypted messages for their teammates to decode, but beware — the other team can see your encrypted messages, too. As the rounds go by, see if you can use the enemy team’s previous messages to crack the code and figure out what their next one might say.
4+ players
Drawphone is like Telephone, but with pictures. The game will give you all the instructions you need, so don’t worry if you haven’t played before, but the idea is that everyone starts out by making a drawing with a caption. After that, you’ll go back and forth getting drawings with no captions (and guessing what the caption should be) and captions with no drawings (and making a new drawing for it). Drawphone isn’t competitive; the goal is to just have fun! This game is best when played with very imaginative friends.
All games have an option to play in a private room with only people you’ve invited, but if you feel like making new friends, many have opportunities to play with strangers in public rooms, too. Online games may not be the same as hanging out in person, but they definitely make the wait for the pandemic to end more bearable. Have fun!