Recommendations for virtual games to play online with friends?

March 29, 2020 6:19 PM

My group of poker friends is looking for a good virtual game to play together. Ideally, it would have realtime video or audio so we could talk with each other, but we could always spin up Zoom in the background if needed. Does anyone know of a good online poker game that could be played together? What about other more general games?

Looking for anything we could do as a group, virtually, once a week to get some human interaction. Thanks!

posted by bjork24 to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I just got off a zoom call with my friends where one who had access to https://jackboxgames.com/ shared their screen and we all played
posted by Jon_Evil at 6:49 PM on March 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

www.boardgamearena.com does not, I don't think, have poker, but it has quite a few card games and tons of board games in general. Most of it is accessible free, and it has built-in audio/video connectivity if someone does pay for a premium account.

And there's always Tabletop Simulator for about twenty bucks, assuming people have the computer rigs to run it. (My old laptop melted after about ten minutes, but my spouse's current laptop can manage it for hours at a time.)
posted by Scattercat at 6:49 PM on March 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

I asked a similar question a week ago and got some good suggestions.

My friends and I played a session of Ticket to Ride + Zoom on Friday and it went great, but like most Euro-style boardgames is limited to 4 players.
posted by justkevin at 6:51 PM on March 29, 2020

My friends and I are using Tabletopia. One of us has a premium account and starts the games; everybody else just has a free account. You could split the $10/month subscription fee among everybody if that's helpful.
posted by zebra at 6:56 PM on March 29, 2020

I've been playing Mario Kart Tour with friends. It's a free mobile app -- we all friended each other and play in a multiplayer room, and we use Zoom on the laptop so we can trash-talk. It's very fun.
posted by ourobouros at 10:04 PM on March 29, 2020

Best answer: Some of my friends have been using the app pokerface, which is like poker and video chat?
posted by wowenthusiast at 3:05 AM on March 30, 2020

If you can all run Tabletop Simulator, you can play literally card game you want. They have a 4-copies-for-the-price-of-3 bundle at the moment on Steam. It also runs a load of other board games (some for a paid DLC, some for free), and you can spawn various game components (poker chips, chess pieces, dice, etc). I tried it last week with my board game group and it was a lot of fun playing card games and inventing a marble game.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:41 AM on March 30, 2020

One of my friends' poker group moved to PokerStars, which they play amongst themselves for free on the site, and Venmo the winner(s). They do a Zoom meeting for shit talking.
posted by booooooze at 8:09 AM on March 30, 2020