Games to play on FaceTime
Ten games that hold up on a video call, with an honest note on what the screen takes away. The first one runs in the browser you already have open, on FaceTime, Zoom, WhatsApp or Google Meet.
10 games rated0 apps to installAny video call Play the first one now-
1. Truth or Dare
2–10 players Best on a callTurns and one prompt at a time, which is exactly the shape a video call wants. It is the only game on this list where the deck itself knows you are apart: with Playing apart on, every card that assumes you are sitting together drops out, so nobody is handed a dare they cannot do. Open a room, send the link, keep the call running beside it.
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2. Never Have I Ever
3+ players Works unchangedSomeone says a thing they have never done; anyone who has done it puts a finger down. Needs no props and no shared space, and holding your hand up to a camera is the whole mechanic, so the screen costs it nothing. Fades fast with only two people, because half the fun is watching everyone else react.
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3. Would You Rather
2+ players Works unchangedTwo bad options, pick one, defend it. Purely spoken, so it survives a laggy connection better than almost anything else here. The trick is having good dilemmas ready: making them up on the spot is where the game usually dies.
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4. Two Truths and a Lie
2+ players Works unchangedSay three things about yourself, one of them false. Video actually helps this one: reading a face is the whole game, and you are looking straight at it rather than across a table.
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5. 20 Questions
2 players Works unchangedOne person thinks of something, the other has twenty yes-or-no questions. Slow, quiet and good for a long call where nobody wants to be loud. Better one-to-one than in a group.
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6. Most Likely To
3+ players Needs a groupSomeone reads a card, everyone points at whoever fits. On a call you say the name instead of pointing, which loses the reveal at the same moment, the funniest part. Fine with four or more, pointless with two.
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7. Charades
3+ players Works, with a rule changeActing reads fine on camera as long as whoever is performing steps back so their hands are in frame. Drop the timer: lag makes a strict thirty seconds unfair to whoever has the worse connection.
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8. Pictionary
3+ players Needs a second screenHolding paper up to a webcam is worse than it sounds: it is mirrored, badly lit and unreadable. You need a shared whiteboard in another tab, which means everyone is now managing two windows.
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9. Music guessing
2+ players Fights the microphonePlay a few seconds, guess the song. The problem is that call apps are built to cut background sound, so music arrives crushed and clipped. Works if the person playing it holds their phone to the mic, which nobody enjoys doing.
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10. Watching something together
2+ players Not really a gameWorth naming because it is on every list like this one. It fills time and it is nice, but it is two people being quiet together rather than a game. Good after a game, not instead of one.
What a video call takes away
Three things break when a game moves onto a call, and knowing which one a game depends on tells you in advance whether it will survive.
Nobody shares an object. No board, no cards on a table, no pen passed round. Any game whose state lives on a physical thing has to move that state onto a screen someone else controls, and that is where most of them fall apart.
Doing things together at the same moment stops working. Half a second of lag ruins anything where people are meant to answer, point or shout at once. Turn-based games barely notice; anything scored on speed is unplayable.
You only see a face. Not hands, not what somebody is holding, not the room. Games that depend on watching a person are fine, better than fine, since you are looking straight at them. Games that depend on watching what a person does are not.
Truth or dare survives all three because it was already turn-based, already spoken, and already had nothing on the table. The only part that needed fixing was the dares that assume two people in one room, and those are tagged so the game can simply not deal them. 1,057 of the dares here are written to work at a distance, and every truth does; they are printed on the dares for truth or dare and truth or dare questions pages.
Setting it up
Take the call on one device and open the game on another: laptop for the call, phone for the cards, or the other way round. Running both on one phone means switching apps every turn, and on an iPhone that pauses your video, which everyone on the call notices.
One person opens a room here and pastes the link into the call chat. Everyone else taps it and they are in: no account, no install, nothing to approve. The cards land on every screen at once, so nobody is reading aloud from a list and quietly picking the easy ones. The rules do not change on a call; how to play truth or dare covers them in thirty seconds if anyone is new.
If you only have one device between you, play from the lists on the over-text page instead and read them out. It works, it is just more effort.
Keep reading
Questions about FaceTime games
Short answers before your first call.
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