Game night in quarantine!

Back in normal times, we would get together with Susan and Monse from time to time for dinner and game night. We would usually play Apples to Apples, (although I keep lobbying to play Carcassonne or Dominion or try out Netrunner, and Nikola wants to do Cards Against Humanity). Obviously, card and board games doesn’t translate well when players are physically separated, especially a game that requires judging cards. I’m sure there is a way to do it and Susan had an idea for a low tech solution. (but where’s the fun in that?)

I suggested that we try playing some Jackbox party games. While the host must have a console or PC that runs the game, the rest is all just streaming and players use their individual phones to respond to the game. Nikola has done this with her friends before and said it was good fun. But it is one thing if every player is on an individual laptop and phone. It is a little more technically challenging to have an entire group on a side. So, as Matt Damon’s character says in The Martian, “I’m going to have to science the $#%& out of this.”

Xbox has a feature called Mixer that allows gamers to stream their screens so others can watch them play. So I streamed our Xbox running Jackbox Party Pack, and viewed my Mixer page on my laptop as a full screen stream. Then, I created a Zoom meeting and shared the fullscreen Mixer stream. The other participants could view exactly what our Xbox was showing (near real-time) and their camera captured their response in a little Zoom window. Our laptop camera captured our side of the party as well.

There were some technical hurdles. The Xbox sound pretty much obliterated everyone’s faint voices, since everyone was some distance away from the laptop mic, so I had to turn the in-game volume all the way down). I also created an extra layer of complexity by then trying to mirror my mirrored Zoom screen back to the TV so we could see the whole thing on a larger screen. This actually worked out well, although we had no audio on the TV.

It would probably work better with the participants just viewing the Mixer stream in their own browser window and a separate Zoom window to see people. But for a first try it worked reasonably well. The kids liked Quiplash and Fibbage.