We’re a month and a half into quarantine, and, admit it, your Zoom happy hour has gotten a little stale. The novelty of virtual backgrounds has worn off, you’re running out of Netflix recommendations to share, and there are only so many times you and your friends can have the “when is this all going to be over” debate before becoming thoroughly depressed.

It’s time to spice things up. Here are five games you can play with your friends on Zoom to put the happy back in happy hour.

Family Feud

Saturday was our turn to host Zoom game night and we went with Family Feud. My sister’s friends recently played it and forwarded us their questions and I found a great free “Friendly Feud” PowerPoint template complete with graphics, sounds, and animations. We customized the questions for our group of friends (there are a ton online) and created a scoresheet in Excel to keep track of answers. There are a few ways you can set it up on Zoom, but here’s how we did it:

Using a two-monitor setup, I pulled up the PowerPoint on my computer and displayed the slide show on the extra monitor. In Zoom, I shared the screen of the extra monitor so my friends couldn’t see the backend of the PowerPoint, which included the answers. We had our scoresheet pulled up on my husband’s computer, but you can print that out as well or use your phone/tablet.

If you don’t have an extra monitor, you can just write the answers down on a sheet of paper, your scorecard, or tablet/phone and share your screen with the PowerPoint slide show display featured. Just make sure you start the PowerPoint before sharing your screen so the answers aren’t shown.

We went by standard Family Feud rules. Split your friends into two teams (we went with boys vs. girls) and pick team captains. Flip a coin to see who goes first at the start of each round. We played until one team got to 300 points and then did a Fast Money round. For two teams of five, this took about three standard rounds. In the Fast Money round, have the team captain pick two people to play and while the first person goes, kick the second into the Zoom waiting room so they can’t see the answers. If the team gets to 200 points in the Fast Money round, they win!

Bonus points if you dress up to host:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B_bZVj4FHAD/

The PowerPoint template we used is originally from Youth Downloads but we customized it with our own questions. You can download it below, along with a scoresheet template:

Zoom Family Feud

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Trivia

Trivia is pretty self-explanatory, but here’s how our group did it. Create four rounds with five questions each. Give your friends the categories of the questions at the start of each round (i.e. Geography, Literature, TV shows, etc.). Each person/team will have five point values to choose from for each of the first three rounds: 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. They can only use each point value once per round. In the fourth round, the Double Down Round, those point values are — you guessed it — doubled. Have each team send you their answers privately in the Zoom chat or text them to you. Take it up a notch by holding a contest for best team name.

Zoom Trivia

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Bingo

Want something a little more low-key? Try Bingo. There are several free Bingo card generators online, but I like MyFreeBingoCards.com because it gives you 30 free randomized cards, which you can send to your friends to print out, or, even better, an online version they can “dab” virtually.

You can either do a traditional Bingo card and call out numbers or customize it like we did:

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Horse Racing Game

Hold your own Kentucky Derby on Saturday on Zoom! There are several horse racing games out there, but I recommend one of these from Amazon:

Across the Board Horse Racing Game (Amazon)

GoSports Derby Dash Horse Race Game (Amazon) 

If you’re hosting, position one Zoom camera so it shows the board (my friends got creative and suspended an iPad from the light fixture over their dining room table) and another so you can see your participants and vice versa.

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Jackbox Games

Funkhouser contributor Richmond Bramblet is an expert on Jackbox, so I’ll let him tell you about it:

If you’re looking for a full party game experience, check out any number of the irreverent titles available from Jackbox Games. Only one person needs to own a copy of the game, and you can run it via screenshare in Zoom. All players will use their phones as controllers by logging into Jackbox.tv with the room code, and you’re ready to play. Jackbox Games are available over a wide variety of platforms, but you’ll need to get it through Steam for Zoom streaming purposes.

While these are just a few of the game options, there are 30+ titles across six “Jackbox Party Packs.” Some are winners, while others miss the mark. In Fibbage, you are presented a fact with one of the critical words missing. You must fill in the blank with a convincing lie, and hope that other players choose your answer. With Quiplash, you are secretly given prompts to answer on your phone. Your answers will go head to head with another player, while everyone votes on their favorite. The game of Drawful has players making a drawing on their phone of a secret prompt. Players will then see your drawing and write a caption to fool others into thinking it was the actual prompt.

All games last about 10-15 minutes, so you can play a bunch of them in one sitting. The two bundles that have the most bang for your buck are Jackbox Party Pack 2 (Fibbage 2, Quiplash XL, & three more) or Party Pack 3 (Quiplash 2, Trivia Murder Party, Tee K.O., & two more).