Games that can be played by phone

The Game Room
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In this age of social isolation I’d like to engage some friends in games we could play together while physically separated, preferably while in voice contact. Not looking for online games*. I want to be talking to one person on the phone and have us play a game together.

Chess and trivia games would obviously work, but what else?

Is there a way to play Scrabble in this way? I don’t see how, given that the physical bag of unused letters needs to be shared. Lets have some ideas from the SD hive mind - please and thank you!

  • One friend and I have tried various online games and I have to say they mostly suck. Tried a few online Scrabble apps and the interfaces were awful, full of ads, etc. And I very much dislike creating accounts for anything unnecessary (I have upwards of 20 for work alone), so I’m very down on online gaming and realize my chosen constraints make it difficult. But if anyone can point me to online games that are free, clean and usable and don’t require account creations, I’m open to it.
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If you trust your friend and you’re willing to throw out the rule where you can toss your tiles, you could generate a sequence of random numbers 1-100 in Excel or at random.org and map them to Scrabble tiles. 1 through 9 would be A, 10 and 11 would be B, 12 and 13 would be C, . . . 100 would be Z.* Then pass this list of numbers (or even the list as letters, if you really really trust them) to your friend. Don’t look at the list of tiles until you need to draw some. Announce your plays and “draw” tiles as needed.

You can reduce the chance of accidentally knowing what your opponent will draw with a little bit of cross-referencing. Make another list and put them in two columns:

  1. 04 35
  2. 10 06
  3. 85 32
  4. 32 95
  5. 92 37
    . . .
  6. 49 31

The first column tells you to look at the 4th location in the second column. The 95 tells you it’s the 95th tile sorted alphabetically, which is W. So your first tile drawn is a W. Depending on your spreadsheet skill, this can be done pretty easily.

[Edit: This might have already been done somewhere, like random dice rollers that can share results with other people, but I couldn’t find anywhere list that.]