Best Ideas for Your Next Game Night
Game nights are a great way to spend time with your friends and bond. They provide a reason to get together and add a degree of structure to your evening while still being fun. For some, game nights are a once-in-a-while thing but for others, they’re an event that they host religiously every week or every month.
Some people enjoy playing the same game over and over again, but others prefer to mix it up a little and try something new. If you fall into this second group, here are some ideas for your next game night.
A Deck of Cards
There are many new board and card games being released at the moment, social media and other parts of the internet are regularly flooded with ads and sponsored posts trying to promote the latest one. Many of these modern games are great fun, but some of the older tried and tested classics remain popular among players.
A single standard deck of 52 cards opens up so many options from go fish to poker and it’ll cost you just a couple of bucks.
Of course, you’ll actually have to look up and learn the rules to any of the games that you’re going to play since most decks don’t come with any instructions. Thankfully, there are resources for just about every game imaginable, so you shouldn’t have any trouble. For example, if you want to play crazy eights, you need to understand the different values of the cards as they’re unlike most other card games. Similarly, if you’re considering hosting an igaming night, since you can have a promo for live dealer casino games with DraftKings you’ll need to understand what is required for it, including how to shuffle the cards, in what order they should be dealt, and how to look after the pot.
Exploding Kittens
Exploding Kittens is a card game with a difference. It was one of the first games to achieve notoriety through a crowdfunding campaign and has since inspired many copycats.
Described as a card game for people that like “kittens and explosions and laser beams and sometimes goats”, it was published on Kickstart in late January 2015 with a target of raising $10,000. However, interest in this feline-themed game was so high that it hit the goal in just eight minutes and had received more than 100,000 backers after just a week.
Less than a month after going live, nearly 220,000 people had pledged $8.78 million, ensuring Exploding Kittens could go into production.
The rules are similar to many games you play with a standard deck of cards but they are made more entertaining by the inclusion of cartoon kittens and bombs.
Meta Quest 2
If you want to bring your game night into the 21st century, then a VR headset is definitely the way to go. You might think that virtual reality gaming is something that won’t work in a group, but the Meta Quest 2 and other leading headsets include a feature that allows you to stream what’s shown on the headset to another screen.
This makes for quite an entertaining experience for the people watching, especially among friends who can either offer advice and words of encouragement for the person wearing the headset, or they can throw in some friendly banter about how poor they’re doing.
Some VR games like Beat Saber include a “party mode” where you can keep a leaderboard of high scores so you can retain the competitive element of game night even though you’re taking it in turns to step into virtual reality.
Because there are so many different titles available for the Meta Quest 2 and other VR headsets, you’ll almost certainly find something that interests you and your buddies. For example, if you and your pals are fans of golf, then games like Golf +, Walkabout Mini Golf, and Golf 5 E Club would be a great addition to your next game night.
Alternatively, popular video game franchises like Medal of Honor and Elder Scrolls have been ported into VR. Any of these titles would go down a treat if you and your buddies are big fans of these shooting titles.
