This is a really cool idea! My friends and I play games and watch movies through Zoom. We just screenshare one person's screen, and it usually works out.
I'm not sure if there's a way to create a platform to play any game through Zoom, but if you have a Google Form with game requests, I'm sure you can very quickly scale up your offerings with confidence.
There are plenty of sites and tools for watching for watching together
Netflix Party (browser extension): Syncs netflix
SyncLounge (webapp): Syncs plex
twoseven.xyz: Create a room and play Youtube, Netflix, Prime Videos, Hulu, or really any <video> on any website with the extension
Tuturu.tv / Caracal.club: Gives you a VM in the cloud where you can play any video and watch together. Good when you have only a single netflix/hbo account or whatever. You're guaranteed to have a single view and can share control.
SyncPlay: An plugin for VLC/MPC that syncs local files
There are many more, andchill.tv for Youtube, Kast, and so on. Zoom is probably the last solution i'd use for this.
I can understand wanting to avoid bad press given the current state of things, but even still I'm shocked that Netflix and especially Disney haven't hit these with C&Ds for trademark use given the obvious potential for confusion.
Netflix Party at least has existed for years. I used it at least 4 years ago if not longer. What surprises me is that none of these sites have made a built-in version of this feature.
Well, and that's exactly the source of the confusion. I was sent a "Netflix Party" link recently and sure enough, it was a regular Netflix.com URL that loaded and played the movie we were planning to watch. I had no idea until I was told that I needed to switch to Chrome and install a browser extension before it would actually do the synchronized play.
If it was "Watch Together" or something, it would immediately clue me in that there was something else I was going to need to install or sign up for in order to make it work.
Regarding discoverability, can't Chrome extensions register themselves to handle custom schemas? If Netflix Party gave you a party://netflix/movie-id/session-id URL, then it would fail to resolve on a machine without the plugin installed, while still not requiring any centralized infrastructure.
https://parsecgaming.com/ is made to play local-multiplayer games remotely. It is like screensharing, but it forwards controller inputs as well at super low latency.
Hangouts Video Chat removed the feature at some point, but it used to have games you could play in video calls. Two in particular my college buddies and I thoroughly enjoyed playing - Warlight (a rebranded Risk) and Poker.
I was actually thinking the other day it'd be great if any of the chat apps had that now that the whole world is connecting via video chat
There are also lots of io games, I've been playing a lot of curvytron.com
There's also a pile of Jackbox games, where only the host needs to buy the game and participant can play from their phone using jackbox.tv and the code.
Just to add another suggestion, Tabletop Simulator on Steam is pretty great and on sale now [1]. My friends and I used it to play our first online game of Catan on Saturday night, we used Discord for voice chat. We all have the boxed version but obviously we can't get together...
How does that compare to playing Catan via Catan Universe? I enjoy the multi-platform (Mac, PC, iOS, Android, Browser, Steam) aspect of it, but it does have some rough edges.
One of my friends tried Catan Universe yesterday and says he prefers Tabletop Simulator. He also said that Catan Universe limits the number of players in the game; we had 5 players over the weekend and may have another friend join soon.
Some of my younger family wanted to play Monopoly: as only a couple were remote (only one in the end) we decided to host it locally on a board, and have people join by webcam (https://meet.jit.si/).
They're planning on Risk next, but I fancy Catan with multiple boards (not sure how to work it; we only have the base game).
We'd considered Table-Top Simulator, but webcam gave us more human interaction which seemed more important for the kids (they chose the real board over the virtual one). They already have lots of video gaming time which might have influenced the decision.
(FWIW there's an unofficial mod for Monopoly on T-TSim.)
My buddies and I play Risk on http://landgrab.net and it's very nice, tons of different boards to choose from. We do 24 hour turns so it's different than playing live, it's more like correspondence chess.
It's quite obvious to me that they were advocating against promoting Zoom by using it in any manner. That is, playing tabletop games or otherwise.
I had a similar reaction when I read this thread's title: "I can't believe the frontpage was flooded with articles about Zoom being controversial privacy-wise a couple of days ago and now this pops up".
Yeah, it is odd that Zoom is even used in the title of the submission at all. Given the current zoom media storm, it is obvious clickbait since the actual linked site does not mention Zoom anywhere. A better title might be "Play Social Games Like Werewolf and Secret Hitler Remotely"
I'd say Jackbox.tv would be a good name drop instead of Zoom since they've popularized the "code sharing Gameroom website" technology.
If you're more into wargaming, VASSAL has been around forever, each game module gives you virtual versions of maps, counters, charts, dice, etc so you can play whatever games you own (or many have rules and everything you need to play anyway).
It acts like a virtual tabletop for hundreds of games.
My wife & daughter have been playing various board games via Duo with my in-laws. They went with this approach to add a level of "hands-on" to the gameplay. They have to limit their options to games both parties have, but that leaves literally dozens of options.
The nice thing is that any video-enabled platform will work for this.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadUnfortunately- if I click on any of these links, I get the following message- Cannot GET /onu-werewolf/
I'm not sure if there's a way to create a platform to play any game through Zoom, but if you have a Google Form with game requests, I'm sure you can very quickly scale up your offerings with confidence.
[0] https://www.jackboxgames.com/
http://gamecraft.live/
Netflix Party (browser extension): Syncs netflix
SyncLounge (webapp): Syncs plex
twoseven.xyz: Create a room and play Youtube, Netflix, Prime Videos, Hulu, or really any <video> on any website with the extension
Tuturu.tv / Caracal.club: Gives you a VM in the cloud where you can play any video and watch together. Good when you have only a single netflix/hbo account or whatever. You're guaranteed to have a single view and can share control.
SyncPlay: An plugin for VLC/MPC that syncs local files
There are many more, andchill.tv for Youtube, Kast, and so on. Zoom is probably the last solution i'd use for this.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disney-plus-party/...
I can understand wanting to avoid bad press given the current state of things, but even still I'm shocked that Netflix and especially Disney haven't hit these with C&Ds for trademark use given the obvious potential for confusion.
If it was "Watch Together" or something, it would immediately clue me in that there was something else I was going to need to install or sign up for in order to make it work.
Regarding discoverability, can't Chrome extensions register themselves to handle custom schemas? If Netflix Party gave you a party://netflix/movie-id/session-id URL, then it would fail to resolve on a machine without the plugin installed, while still not requiring any centralized infrastructure.
Somewhat related, I built a simple Boggle-like word game to play with my family over screen share: https://wordgame.paulbutler.org/
Pretty neat word game! Will have to try
Also have we hugged it to death because Codenames is 404-ing? https://netgames.io/codenames/
edit: ok when I registered my name I stopped getting the 404, not sure if that was intentional or just timing
I was actually thinking the other day it'd be great if any of the chat apps had that now that the whole world is connecting via video chat
Codenames: https://www.horsepaste.com/
Secret Hitler: http://secrethitler.io/
Plenty of other board games in the browser:
https://tabletopia.com
https://boardgamearena.com/
There are also lots of io games, I've been playing a lot of curvytron.com
There's also a pile of Jackbox games, where only the host needs to buy the game and participant can play from their phone using jackbox.tv and the code.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/286160/Tabletop_Simulator...
Worked quite well.
I asked a related question about playing boardgames via webcam here https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/50797/what-ho... and have a self-answer about our experience.
They're planning on Risk next, but I fancy Catan with multiple boards (not sure how to work it; we only have the base game).
We'd considered Table-Top Simulator, but webcam gave us more human interaction which seemed more important for the kids (they chose the real board over the virtual one). They already have lots of video gaming time which might have influenced the decision.
(FWIW there's an unofficial mod for Monopoly on T-TSim.)
Anybody have examples of games you can play with in combination with Zoom and a Google Presentation?
It's online pictionary and seemed to work very well, although admittedly the scoring does depend on people's typing speed
https://netgames.io/games/
[1] https://kosmi.io/
Game over.
I had a similar reaction when I read this thread's title: "I can't believe the frontpage was flooded with articles about Zoom being controversial privacy-wise a couple of days ago and now this pops up".
I'd say Jackbox.tv would be a good name drop instead of Zoom since they've popularized the "code sharing Gameroom website" technology.
It acts like a virtual tabletop for hundreds of games.
https://jitsi.org/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
The nice thing is that any video-enabled platform will work for this.
Guess Who and Battleships would obviously work well for one-on one, but something for three or four would be good.
cool...