March 28, 2020

Hosting A Virtual Game Night With Friends

I picked up our new kitties today! I will write more about them tomorrow. They are very shy right now and getting used to us, so I want to give them a moment to take it all in before I start snapping lots of pictures.

Last night was super fun! I love game nights with friends, but considering this quarantine fun, I wanted to look at virtual options.

I watched a movie called "Unfriended: The Dark Web" a few weeks ago, and it gave me the idea to host a game night with friends. On the movie, the friends played Cards Against Humanity via Skype. When I suggested using Skype, I was apparently moved to the "Boomer" category, hahaha.

I learned that Zoom is the new Skype!

So, I downloaded Zoom, and it was actually really simple to set up. I created a meeting for last night at 7:00 pm and I had an idea for a game that I thought would work well virtually: Wits & Wagers (Amazon affiliate link).



Wits and Wagers is a super fun game! You draw a card that asks a question (the answer is always going to be a number). The answers are nearly impossible for anyone to actually guess, which is the whole point.



When playing in person, everyone writes down their guess on a little dry erase board and then the boards are placed in order from lowest to highest. The number "1" is a given (think of The Price is Right" rules... you want to be closest without going over). I just made up these numbers to show an example to my friends:


Then everybody takes turn placing "Meeples" (little wooden people, big and small) on their bets. You want to guess the closest number without going over. The big Meeple is worth two points, the small Meeple is worth one point. You can place your Meeples on one card, split them up, put them both on your own card, or on others' cards. Wherever you want.


Then, after reading the answer, whoever guesses closest to the actual number without going over gets one point. Each of the people who have Meeples on that card also get points, depending on whether they are small/large Meeples.

It's a super fun game!! And I thought I'd be able to modify it pretty easily for playing virtually with friends. I used index cards and post-it notes to write down the guesses, because we had more people than we had game boards/Meeples.

Jerry and I used each of our laptops. One of them was facing down at the game pieces and the other was facing Jerry and I so we could easily chat with everyone. The computer on the left is mine, facing down at the game pieces. Jerry's is on the right, where we could chat.



I read the question aloud, then each person wrote down their guess on a scrap paper without anyone seeing. Once everyone wrote down a guess, they read their guess aloud and I wrote it on their index card. I placed all the cards in numerical order. Then, we placed our "Meeples".


Since we had more people than the number of Meeples, I had to improvise with game pieces. I used color coded pieces from one of Eli's Rubik's Cubes that had come apart. It worked out well!

We had fun playing the game, but mostly it was fun to just see everyone and catch up! We played with two other couples--Jack and Amy, and Eric and Maris. I had no idea how it was going to go, so I didn't invite a lot of people. But everyone liked it, so we made plans to do it again next Friday.

If you haven't tried Zoom, it's a great way to connect with people right now! I'm going to see if my parents/siblings would want to set up a game as well. Yahtzee would be an easy game to play--almost everyone has dice! It's super fun to play a virtual game night :)


2 comments:

  1. What a clever idea to be social yet distant. Maybe try the game Balderdash with your family. It's super fun.

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  2. The game Quiplash can be played very easily via zoom. One person has to "own" the game and shares their screen with the rest who play via their phones online and it is super fun! I saw one FB friend had played it with her church small group. I think up to 8 people can play and 2 more can be "voter only" players.

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