New Year’s Eve Games to Play Online with Friends

The governing constraint of the evening is that nothing can overrun midnight. A game with a forty-minute arc started at 11:30 either gets abandoned at the worst moment or drags the countdown past it. Pick games with rounds measured in minutes, so the group can stop cleanly at any point: Category Blitz, Quick Minds, Pictionary, and Horse Race, whose races take about a minute, all end naturally every few minutes.

Most New Year parties now have a remote contingent - friends in another time zone, someone who stayed home, a group that already hit their own midnight. Everyone joining one room code from their own phone puts the remote players on equal footing instead of making them an audience. Keep a video call up for faces, and resist the urge to screen-share the game: the moment the game lives on one person’s shared screen, the people watching it become spectators.

Tactical Synchronization Active

Initiate Operation Now

This is the one night where looking backwards is the theme. 2 Truths 1 Lie works unusually well when everyone draws their material from the past twelve months, because the group knows enough to have a real argument about which one is false. Vote Party turns into an accidental year-in-review once the group starts voting on who is most likely to have done what this year.

By eleven the room is loud and nobody can hear a rules explanation. Drawing and category games survive this because the screen carries the instruction: Pictionary needs no verbal explanation at all, and Category Blitz explains itself in one round. Save the talking-heavy deduction games for earlier in the evening, or for the group that ends up in the kitchen after midnight.

Every list of New Year games eventually becomes a list of drinking games, which quietly excludes the designated driver, anyone not drinking, and anyone who has to work on the first. None of these games need alcohol to function, and a group that plays them sober plays them better. If your party has both, pick games where the scoring is not the point - prompt and drawing games - so nobody is at a disadvantage.

The hardest hour, solved: