How to play Bridge online with video chat

June 8, 2020 4:43 PM

I am looking for a way to be able to get together virtually with some friends to play Bridge. I have found a number of sites that have chat functions - but ideally we would like to be able to see each other on video. Do you know of any Bridge programs (online or apps) that would allow this? (Or do we just have to use Zoom alongside another Bridge site?). Second order question: what online Bridge sites do you prefer for playing with a closed group of people you know? Many thanks, MeFites!
posted by sonofsnark to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (8 answers total)

I have always played on bridge base online, but it doesn't have video. It's an old system so whoever's hosting might need a little savvy to help get everyone seated, and the game set up (especially if playing duplicate), but otherwise it's a very nice interface for playing. Last I checked many competitive players used the site.
posted by dbx at 5:06 PM on June 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

Zoom would be my guess, I don't think Bridgebase Online offers video chat. I'd love to know about more platforms for playing in general, as I've just been reminded of my interest in the game.
posted by Alensin at 5:08 PM on June 8, 2020

Our little bridge group has been using bridgebase online combined with a basic conference call on our phones and it has worked really well. The big draw for us was that it was free and it allows for kibitzers (watchers) since we often have 5-6 who rotate in and out of the seats. No video option.
posted by metahawk at 5:12 PM on June 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

Friends don't let friends Zoom. Jitsi Meet is great; I've been using it with great success for weekly remote-play Jackbox games, with non-technical users. (No client to download. Works in-browser. No account to create. End-to-end peer-reviewed crypto.)

Audio is much more important than video. If you do one thing, make sure every participant has clear audio -- which, outside of a studio environment (and often, even in one) means USE. MONKEYFIGHTING. HEADPHONES. lest you feed back; no built-in echo cancellation in the world is up to this problem. Use the horrible built-in laptop mic if you must, but not with the conference audio playing over speakers. Hard nope.
posted by sourcequench at 5:31 PM on June 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

Discord works pretty well for this. They recently added video chat.
posted by neckro23 at 7:19 PM on June 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

Seconding Discord (or Zoom if that's more your speed) -- I've been playing multiplayer games with groups of people for most of my life, and for most of that time, games didn't include their own voice chat, so we just used a secondary app for voice. Now that many games do include voice, their voice integrations pretty uniformly suck, so we still use voice/video in 3rd party apps like Discord.

That said, I wonder if there's now a market for a WebRTC+card games service...
posted by Alterscape at 8:16 PM on June 8, 2020

I've used Tricker Cards before which does have integrated video and text chat. The video sometimes stopped working for us, so we eventually ended up using a separate video chat session.
posted by flicken at 9:58 PM on June 8, 2020

Best answer: Seconding Trickster Cards. I use it to play Euchre a couple of times a week and it's great. One single member of our group has occasional video issues with it (and only it, Zoom is fine) but for the majority of us it works fine every time.
posted by SpiffyRob at 3:42 AM on June 9, 2020