Looking for online tournaments

February 10, 2009 7:19 AM

I'm looking for a website that will let me and a bunch of friends compete in some sort of online tournament against each other. That is, I want a site that I can go to every day, play some sort of short online game, and see how I do compared to a specific group of friends. And I'd like rankings to be updated daily and monthly. What are my options?

The only website I know that's exactly the format I'm looking for is my.funtrivia.com, but frankly, the questions there suck. They're badly written and very narrowly focused.

So really what I'm looking for is a non-crappy version of my.funtrivia.com. (Although it doesn't have to be trivia. Any competition suitable for short daily work breaks is fine.)

posted by yankeefog to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Facebook has plenty of games like this.
posted by mikepop at 7:44 AM on February 10, 2009

Seconding facebook. Plenty of stuff there, from scrabble to risk to geography trivia games, etc, and you can invite your friends to play, and compare you tops scores or play directly against each other or whatever.
posted by Grither at 8:26 AM on February 10, 2009

Response by poster: Facebook would be great since most of my friends are already on it -- but most of the games I've played there ( Word Twist, Scrabulous, Scramble, etc) let you play single games against three or four specific friends at a time, but I haven't seen anything with a tournament structure. What specific games would you recommend?
posted by yankeefog at 8:40 AM on February 10, 2009

You may want to try Globulos. And also take a look here.
posted by zouhair at 8:42 AM on February 10, 2009

I would recommend looking into old Play By Mail stuff. It's been a while, but I reccon that there ought to be simple enough to run on ones own server or somesuch. Brings back memories it does…
posted by monocultured at 9:16 AM on February 10, 2009

A couple forums (fora?) that I visit have a special arcade section for members (e.g. this one), that has little arcade-y games and scoreboards. Worst case, you could set up a forum with this feature for yourselves, and only let you and your friends register. It's all free and open source.
posted by losvedir at 9:25 AM on February 10, 2009

I'm In Like With You has amazing multiplayer games and you can see your friends' rank if you add them as "friends". The ranking system isn't a huge part of the community though.
posted by shadytrees at 10:21 AM on February 10, 2009

if a super-lite rpg sounds like it could be fun, find a Legend of the Red Dragon server somewhere. one turn a day, each turn is around 5-15 minutes long, and there's a scoreboard and other internal "rating" sorts of things... bribe the shopkeep, get your friend's room key, and kill him in his sleep... it's fine, he'll be alive the next morning, just with a little less money!

it's kind of a blast. dates back to old BBS days, but that doesn't impair the fun at all. still running on a number of webpages/servers.
posted by radiosilents at 11:10 AM on February 10, 2009

Check out SuperDuperGames, as I recall (my work has blocked it), they have dozens of great open-source games which you play through a browser and you can build a friends list to compare stats for each game.
posted by UrbanEconomist at 1:58 PM on February 11, 2009

Response by poster: Thanks, all.
posted by yankeefog at 6:26 AM on February 13, 2009