Your friends are in three cities and two time zones, but game night does not have to die. The best online games to play with friends are free or cheap, run in a browser or on any phone, and take minutes to teach. Here is a set that covers every kind of group — word nerds, artists, detectives and chaos agents included.
skribbl.io — drawing and guessing, no skill required
One player draws a word; everyone else races to type what it is. Bad drawing is not a bug, it is the entire entertainment. skribbl.io is free, runs in a browser tab, needs no accounts, and supports private rooms where you can even load your own word list — loading inside jokes as prompts is where it becomes legendary. Rounds are short, so people can drop in and out.
Codenames Online — the word-association classic
The board game phenomenon works beautifully online: two spymasters give one-word clues linking their team’s words while avoiding the assassin card. It rewards exactly the lateral thinking your word-game friends already have, and it scales from four players to a whole party split into two teams. Video call plus the free online version is, for many groups, the default Friday night.
GeoGuessr — dropped somewhere on Earth, figure out where
You are placed in a random Street View scene anywhere on the planet and must guess your location on a map, scoring by closeness. Played competitively over rounds, it starts arguments about languages on signs, driving sides and vegetation that are far more fun than they sound. Even the free tier’s limited daily games are enough for a regular group’s league.
Jackbox Party Packs — your phone is the controller
One person buys and hosts a pack; everyone else joins free on their phones with a room code. The packs bundle mini-games like Fibbage (invent a believable lie, spot everyone else’s), Quiplash (funniest answer wins) and Drawful (drawing chaos). Because only the host needs the game and a screen to share, it is the closest thing to replicating a living room over a video call.
Among Us — social deduction with your actual friends
Crewmates complete tasks on a spaceship while one or two impostors quietly sabotage and eliminate them; meetings are frantic trials of who was where. It is cross-platform, cheap or free on mobile, and the discussion phase is where friendships are stress-tested. With strangers it is fine; with friends who know each other’s lying tells, it is superb.
Gartic Phone — the telephone game, drawn
Write a sentence, the next player draws it, the next player captions the drawing, and so on — then the group watches each chain mutate into nonsense. It is free in a browser, needs no artistic ability (quite the opposite), and the end-of-game albums are the funniest artefacts any of these games produce. A natural successor once skribbl.io has worn out its welcome.
Words With Friends 2 — the slow-burn league game
Not every friendship runs on scheduled calls. Asynchronous word games let you play a move whenever you have a minute, and Words With Friends — Scrabble-style play against your actual friends list — remains the standard. Keep several matches running and there is always a move waiting; our scoring tips and the Words With Friends Cheat exist for when a rival’s streak needs ending.
Online chess and daily word games — the quiet options
For one-on-one friendships, online chess on the major free sites supports every time control from bullet to correspondence, and the daily-puzzle habit (Wordle, Quordle and friends) becomes a shared ritual when you compare scores in a group chat each morning. Low effort, surprisingly sticky.
Board Game Arena — the classics, digitised properly
When your group wants real board games rather than party games, Board Game Arena hosts faithful online versions of hundreds of published titles — card games, family strategy games and modern classics — free in the browser with proper turn timers and rankings. It is the answer for the friend group that used to meet around an actual table and wants those exact games back, rules enforcement included.
Choosing for your group
Big group, high energy: Jackbox or skribbl.io. Thinkers: Codenames or GeoGuessr. Old friends who mostly want to talk while playing: Gartic Phone or asynchronous Words With Friends. However you gather, keep the games like Wordle list and the Word Tools hub bookmarked — half of game night seems to end in a word argument that a solver can settle.
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