Web-based party games?
1Hi -
Been trying to find a good option for me and a few friends to play some games together online.
The only platform we all have in common is the WWW.
Best option I can find seems to be Jackbox games, but the info on their website is confusing and contradictory.
E.g., in one place it says that screen-sharing is necessary to play together at a distance, but I’m certain I remember playing a game hosted by a Mehtizen where all I needed was to enter a 4 digit code in the online lobby at jackbox.tv.
As I understand it, one of us would have to buy the software to host the game, but the others would only need a browser, but the stuff I read at Jackbox puts that in doubt.
I’m hoping someone here can set me straight on exactly how Jackbox works and also maybe get some other game suggestions.
Not looking for video game games; looking for the kind of stuff Jackbox offers, i.e., trivia, word-games, etc.
Thanks in advance.
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I have a group of friends that occasionally get together for casual games. Usually that’s Cards Against Humanity or Jackbox.
We tried remote Cards Against Humanity a few nights ago and it worked well. I didn’t set it up but the person who did used this combined with Zoom: http://playingcards.io/game/remote-insensitivity
We talked about doing Jackbox soon. Looks like they have a guide: https://www.jackboxgames.com/how-to-play-jackbox-games-with-friends-and-family-remotely/
@shawn We tried humanity on playing cards.io and failed. It meshed the draw piles together and any time someone would draw a card it would mess with my hand. Very frustrating!
Hey, we have done a couple Jackbox gaming sessions recently. I purchased Steam codes on the Jackbox website and redeemed them in my Steam app. It’s honestly, pretty confusing, so if you go that route and get lost, post here again.
With the games purchased and downloaded, we started a Hangouts meeting on our laptop that we used for video/sound, plus we joined the call on a different computer running the Jackbox software. That second computer was muted in the meeting and also the speakers were muted. This meant no audio from the Jackbox games, which, totally works. If it’s a must (and your video host and game host computers are physically very close to each other) you basically need the game host video conference to not make any sounds, because the video host computer will pick those up and you get feedback. Mute the tab or website in the browser, perhaps?
Then, our guests all joined the video conference, we presented from the game host computer, and everyone used a mobile device to play the games. I think the screen-sharing might not be 100% required for some games, but I think it helps. And, obviously any other video conferencing software that does screen-sharing will work instead of Hangouts. You could also get by with just one computer for both, but whoever is presenting won’t have video of those players for everyone else to see - which is at least half the fun.
We also played Kahoot with basically the same method. Finally, we found a couple physical games that more or less worked - Cranium because several of us had a copy of the game, and a game called Just One that worked pretty well with only a copy on our end.
@shawn - that’s exactly the link I read that confused me, because I’m sure I played a Jackbox game hosted by someone here (maybe you?) which was self-contained in a browser window, no screen-sharing necessary.
@mschuette - I’m trying to avoid the need for screen-sharing and video conferencing.
We tried a Skype session last week and the one of us who lives in a condo complex had connection difficulties (presumably because of the density of internet use in her development).
I was hoping we could play a browser-based game while on an audio-only group cellphone call.
@DennisG2014 the self contained jackbox games had a live twitch stream embedded in the forum post to share the game feed from the computer running it. Then we went to jackbox.tv on our phones or computers and entered the code to play.
Thanks for the reminder, I think I’m going to set this up this weekend and have a game night with my sister and nephews.
@djslack Ok, that makes sense. I forgot I had a twitch account.
edit: oh, it was embedded in the forum…
@DennisG2014 That sounds a lot like Discord. You can share the video of the game in a voice channel. If the video is still too taxing, I believe that person could still participate in the voice channel without joining the game video and play along on a device pointed at jackbox.tv.
Part of the confusion may be that Jackbox isn’t a single game. There are 6 different party packs you can get, and each one has a different mix of games. Some of them may work well over just voice, but I know some of them really need the screen share. There is at least one that you actually need full video conferencing, and even then it didn’t work very well.
I haven’t used it yet, but https://netgames.io/games/ has several party games that you could play with a group call/chat/video hangout. I really need to try getting a group together and see how fun it is to play them that way.
I heard the House Party app might be fun for the family. But I haven’t been motivated enough to check it out yet…trying to get through the rest of Scorpion binge-watching
I was just scrolling through forum and misread this title as need-based party games. I know it completely isn’t that, but just wanted to share.