We occasionally get together with friends and play some board game or another, or Cards Against Humanity, or whatever.
Pre-COVID, that is.
So we thought we might try a virtual game night. Short of dropping off half our set of CaH at their place and playing it that way, any other ideas for games that would do well virtually?
Jackbox Games has a number of party games which work well for it. Whoever is “hosting” the game has the game on their computer, and shares their screen through Zoom (or Discord, or whatever), and everyone else plays by entering their answers on their smartphones.
I’ve done Trivial Pursuit over Zoom; it worked out pretty well.
We also do Trivial Pursuit. We break up into teams and the teams take turns answering questions. We don’t use the game board, we just do the trivia questions.
Of the Jackbox games, Quiplash is the group’s favorite.
Password has turned out to be a surprising favorite. A person in the group has an old Password board game and reads the word off of it. We have teams of 2 players. We use the chat screen to put up the word (the person guessing covers up the chat screen).
Somebody has Fact or Crap and it’s also pretty popular.
Jackbox has a knockoff version of Cards Against Humanity but I don’t recall the name of it. The cards weren’t nearly as funny as CAH.
+1 for the jack box games. Also “keep talking and nobody explodes” . You can also go to boardgamearena.com and play a bunch there without zoom. And Netflix party if you want to watch a movie together over the internet.
If your friends are okay with actual video games, Steam has a “remote play” feature that lets someone play with you over the internet via streaming your game. They don’t need a gaming computer or a copy of the game.
All sorts of distance gaming ideas – some require at least one person have a physical copy of a game.
Brian
Thank! I’ll check into some of these. The ones that we could play using a shared screen sound cool.
I would definitely not want something that required everyone to pay attention / be ready to shoot-em-up all the time; we’ll want to talk, get food etc.
As a side note on CAH: We brought our Biggest, Blackest Box along to a get together with about 25 people from all over the English-speaking world. At the end, one of the gang said to my husband “I feel like I know you a lot better now. And I’m very, very afraid”.
My boardgaming group is having a weekly games night on boardgamearena. com. You can either play for free, or pay a relatively small fee for a premium membership (I paid $30 CAD for a year). We are really enjoying the site - we hook up with a Facebook Messenger call on our phones or iPads and chat while we play on our desktops. They are always adding new games, and are responsive to problems or comments.
As a bonus, we can be friends on the site and play together as well. 
The Jackbox Games are great - make sure you get one with some version of Drawful included.
You can play a CaH clone here:
It’d be good if people note whether the games they mention are Zoom-able games, or games where everybody just logs into the same website.
The BGG list has both. Note that even if everyone is playing some game online, they can voice chat using zoom (or similar system). That’s what I do with my friends. (play a game on yacata.de and use some voice chat system* on the side). But this mostly suited to folks who want to play digital versions of board games.
Brian
Thx!!
Tabletop simulator is a really good way to play board games remotely. You can still use zoom for voice/video chat, but it gives a virtual environment with which you can manipulate the boards/pieces/dice/whatever together. There are official modules you licensed games you can buy (only the host needs to own it) but there are hundreds of games on the steam workshop for free.
This is zoomable.