Five more games, and the rule everyone forgets

The first version of Let's Hang did one thing: it made sure enough people said yes before a call existed. That fixed the calendar problem. It did not fix the other one, which shows up about four minutes in, when everybody has said how work is going and somebody says "so, anyway".

A group of friends in a kitchen never has that problem, because there is a table, and on the table there is usually something. Cards, a board, a bowl of crisps. Online there is nothing on the table, so we spent the last two weeks putting things on it.

Five games in a fortnight

We added Would you rather, Truth or dare, Never have I ever, Hangman and Checkers. That makes fourteen games you can start inside a hangout, or play against bots first if you want to know what you are sending people into.

The three party games were the quick ones, and they are quick for a reason: the game is the people, not the mechanics. Would you rather shows two options, everybody votes at the same time, and the split only turns over once the last vote is in. That last part matters more than it sounds. If you can see the votes arriving, the last person votes with the room. If you cannot, you find out that four of you would genuinely give up bread forever, and then you argue about it, which is the actual game.

Never have I ever is ten fingers each and everyone answers at once. Truth or dare has truths you would answer at a dinner table and dares you can do on camera without regretting it in the morning. Passing is a move there, not a failure. We wrote every card ourselves with that rule in mind, because the version of this game that lives on the internet is mostly written for people who will never see each other again.

Checkers took three days

Checkers is the one that looks easy and is not. Not the board, not the moves. The rule.

In English draughts, taking is compulsory. If you can take a piece, you must. And if the piece you just took with can take again, it keeps going, the whole chain, in one turn. Almost nobody remembers this, and it is the rule that decides most games. Leave it out and you have a slow game about moving forward. Put it in and every move becomes a question about what you are offering.

So the engine works out every capture before it offers you a quiet move, and it will tell you "you have to take" if you try to go somewhere else. Crowning ends your turn, even mid chain, which is also the real rule and also surprises people. You can play it against a bot right now, and the bot prefers the take that leads to another take, because that is how anyone plays it.

Writing down the rules, fourteen times

Once there were fourteen games we had a different problem. Every group has one person who knows the rules and thirteen minutes of them explaining it.

Now every game has its own page with the rules in a few lines, and a How to play button inside the room, so nobody has to leave the table to look something up. Each page also says what the game is called elsewhere: noughts and crosses, Mensch ärgere Dich nicht, Mau Mau, dama, hangman is the impiccato. Half of the people who search for these games are not searching in English, and the game they mean is the same game.

There is also a page of pub quiz questions and answers you can read out at your own quiz night, in ten topics, free, no sign up. One rule we gave ourselves there: anything printed on that page is retired from the online game. If you can look up the round you are playing, it is not a quiz, it is a reading exercise. So the bank keeps growing and the published part never overlaps with the part you play.

And then we put leaves on the floor

The last piece is the one nobody asked for and everybody notices. Every hangout has its own table, drawn from its link: the shape, the cloth, the thing sitting on it. Now the floor around the table has something too.

In spring there is grass and the first flowers. In autumn the leaves come down once and then lie there. In winter, settled snow. In summer the sun sits over the table by day and a crescent moon once your screen goes dark. If someone has a birthday, the host can put balloons at the sides and confetti on the floor, and the confetti drops once when the page opens instead of raining forever, because a page that never stops moving is a page you close.

It picks the season from the date of the hangout, so a table in December looks like December without anyone doing anything. The host can override it in one click, before or after the link goes out.

None of this makes a hangout happen. Enough people saying yes is still the only thing that does that. But when it does happen, there is now something on the table, somebody knows the rules, and it looks like the time of year it actually is.

Set a table, pick a game, send one link.