How to Host A Virtual Games Night
By: Alyssa Olivia L.
Tags: Games Night, Fun, Tutorial, Covid 19

Picking a platform

First off I recommend finding the platform that you are comfortable with: whether it’s Skype, Discord, Zoom or Google Meet. The most important is for you the organizer is to be able to share your screen. It was also very important to play test everything before the big event. In our group, we disliked Zoom because the lack of security at the time and due to numerous articles that surfaced at the time warning against its use. I took a gamble on Discord not knowing what to expect. I knew very little about Discord: the interface was clean, concise and appealing to me.. Prior to that, the only thing that I knew about Discord was that gamers used it. The use of Discord evolved to embrace community elements in keeping folks together, whether it was to learn a skill or to play games.

There was nothing to lose and besides nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Selecting the Games

Pictionary

Words by RandomWordGenerator

The words were generated using a Random word generator and participants used a virtual whiteboard. I shared my screen showing the whiteboard for everyone to see. One person drew and everyone had to guess what it was. When I had to communicate with the drawer, I used a combination of private messaging and a voice channel where the number of users were limited to 2.

Laughs and fun were had by everyone as I set the difficulty of words to hard.

Quiplash 2 and Guesspionage (Jackbox Party Pack 3)

Originally I penciled in an online version of Cards Against Humanity, a crowd favourite. When I play-tested it, it worked fine. However when I invited everyone to join the game stipulated that at least one player had to pay for the game. We quickly found another online version called playcards.io and it was very confusing to play. Strike that off the record.

Luckily I had Jackbox Party Pack 3 in my library and Guesspionage was the next game. It’s similar to Family Feud, another crowd favourite. Only this time you had to guess the percentage of people identify with a posed question as it pertained to a topic. The closer the guess, the higher amount of points that you would receive. In later rounds, you can double up or down on your guesses. If you are way off, you get zero points added. Game was ideal for 3–8 players.

E.g. Topic: Bologna; What percentage of people say baloney instead of bologna?

Then we also played Quiplash 2. Quiplash invited more creativity and quick thinking. Players were giving prompts to complete jokes or comics to win the affection of the audience. A more light-hearted and family-oriented Cards Against Humanity would be an apt description of the game. It seemed to me that the majority preferred Quiplash over Guesspionage. Humor and shock value were the order of the day.

Curve Fever Pro

This was not slated on the agenda but the Jackbox Party Pack stopped working unexpectedly. An attendee found this game online and the limit was 6 players. It was a multiple round game of survival where you dared to cross paths and destroy your enemies — pretty fun once you got the hang of it.

Creating the Agenda

In Microsoft Word, I used a template for schedule to be simple and easy to understand. People were excited for the agenda. That was all well and good but in my opinion it needed more colour. For April’s agenda I used Canva to create the agenda for colour and creativity to shine rather than the one-page tabular design I used in March.

Draft of Activities Planned using Canva

Anticipating Technical Challenges

As with any new technology, education and awareness are powerful tools for understanding. I created a PowerPoint to step through the evening’s proceedings so everyone would have a clear indicator of what was happened. With what I knew about navigating Discord, I included a section called Crash Course in Discord highlighting the channel categories and their purpose: Main, Pictionary, Steam and PS4.

Below I highlighted what was the difference between mute and deafen with the voice channels. Simply put: to speak no evil press mute and when you did not want to hear everyone talking press deafen.

After this debrief, the audio challenges experienced by users were found to be minimal.

A snippet from my Games Night PowerPoint

Bonus: Lessons Learned — Live Stream Limits

You know what they say about hindsight. I should have researched how many people could be on a live stream before my first virtual game night session. I had around 12 people on the server and some on multiple devices. At the point in time, the limit was only 10 and people were saying that they were unable to see the live-stream of my additional monitor. Recently Discord dropped an update where the limit was increased to 50 in light of COVID-19.

Stay safe and at home. Happy handwashing for at least 20 seconds!