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Residential Life

Games to play with friends over the internet

By Yiorgos 01 May 2020

These games are not your traditional MMOs (massive multiplayer online games) but rather games that you can play during a video call on the side.

Epic Mafia (https://epicmafia.com/home)

This is a free, online version of the classic Mafia. Everyone needs to make an account but it doesn’t take too long. One person in the group must take charge to create a game, and you can add a password to your game to ensure only the group call enters it. There are many more roles apart from your standard mafia member, cop, doctor and villagers. You can also allow in game whispers, a chat box, which people can choose to “leak” or not.

Skribble.io (https://skribbl.io)

Basically, an online version of Pictionary, where everyone needs to guess what one of you is drawing. The faster you guess, the more points you get. Like all of these, you can create a private room for just your friends to use.

Codenames (https://www.horsepaste.com)

Great game for a video call, based on the great board game. Divide yourselves into two teams, blue and red. Within each team, designate one spymaster. These two people then press spymaster at the bottom. This shows them which card belongs to which team. Aim of the game is your teammates to guess all the cards belonging to your team. If they select a black card or a card of your opponent, it ends your turn. If they select the shaded card, that’s the assassin and that’s an instant defeat. Full rules here: https://czechgames.com/files/rules/codenames-rules-en.pdf

Cards Against Humanity online (https://pyx-1.pretendyoure.xyz/zy/game.jsp)

This doesn’t look as smooth as some of the other websites, but nevertheless it works and allows you to choose from a lot more decks than most of us own. You can create your own game with a password as well as select the number of players as well as the score limit i.e. winning condition. You can also see a list of all the cards in each deck by clicking view cards on the top right.

You can always play Dungeons and Dragons via a video call and there are other options for online board games, ranging from other dedicated websites to downloadable platforms but from experience the games above work well. For more, I have found this article quite useful (https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/board-game/how-to/how-to-play-board-games-online#boardgamearena)