Much like banana bread and my yoga endeavours, the novelty of virtual quizzes has quickly worn off.
Without sounding smug, I’m thrilled my boyfriend and I kicked off our weekly quiz franchise with our University friends because there were literally no expectations. My thoughts go out to the remaining 10 couples who have to muster up quizzes that are original and challenging enough to keep my male friends awake after a beer-fuelled, day-long poker tournament.
As we head into at least another three weeks of isolation, we’ll all be seeking out fun things to do at the weekend and after a test-run on my family this weekend, I’m presenting you with a case for a virtual games night.
As a staunch fan of organised fun, I trawled the internet and racked my memory back to my Uni pre-drinking days to curate a virtual games night for 15 people (many of whom have the attention span of a three-year-old).
As much as I am a control freak, I sent around an itinerary a few days before and assigned everyone their own section of the evening to host. Here are my top tips and activities for a two-hour long virtual games night that will keep everyone entertained and amused…
Assign Happy Hour Hosts
Assign someone / a couple the happy hour host(s) and ask them to perform a live demo on how to make a specific alcoholic or non-alcoholic cocktail (or three) and the perfect canapé. Ask the Happy Hour host to send around a list of ingredients ahead of time so they can challenge guests to replicate the cocktail and canapé after their demo (these are the best alcohol delivery services, FYI). My dad dressed up in a tux and showed us how to make the perfect Negroni (a punchy aperitif!), whilst my mum wore her favourite dress to give a live demo on the perfect smoked salmon and crème fraîche blini and then challenged us to make them based on their instructions. Whoever made theirs the quickest and had the best presentation, won.
Next… move onto the drinking games
If you don’t want a booze-fuelled evening, you can obviously skip this part but my family has a penchant for gin so this round helped loosen everyone up. I assigned the ‘drink game masters’ roles to my brother and his girlfriend and asked them to compile a ‘most likely to’ drinking game – a list of who is most likely to do/be the thing in question and why e.g ‘who is the person most likely to get arrested?’ Or ‘who is the person most likely to win the lottery?’ We all wrote down who we voted for and the person with the most votes at the end of each question had to take a big sip from their drink.
They were also the evening’s ‘ear masters’. Sporadically throughout the evening, they had to subtly grab their ear and guests had to copy. The last team to notice and touch their ear had to drink.
Charades
An oldie but a goodie, my aunt and uncle had to act out a round of charades, which went down well. I only asked them to do three rounds, which went by way too quickly so I’d definitely extend this round next time.
Read My Lips
My mother-in-law had to turn off her microphone and read out three phrases and we had to read her lips and write down what we thought we could see. Whoever is the closest won. Some of the answers had us laughing out loud.
Guess Who?
We asked guests to submit a surprising / random fact about themselves that other people (including their partner) may not know about them ahead of time. We read out these facts and guests had to guess who submitted it. If most people guessed correctly, the person drank, if not, we drank.
We also used a face merging app (there’s lots available for free on the app store) to merge the faces of two family members and then shared our Zoom screen with the rest of the family and asked them to guess which two family members’ faces had been combined. It was pretty easy but hilarious nonetheless.
Bingo
The final round (when everyone was a few G&Ts deep) was the most successful. We asked our cousins to coordinate a game of Bingo for guests. Everyone mocked up their own Bingo cards with random numbers between 1-75 (there’s lots of templates to choose from on Google, too) and we used this Bingo generator.
The aim of the game is simple, get a line or a full house before anyone else. To do this, you need to mark off a number that appears on your ticket each time it is called.
Your first chance to win is to cross off an entire line of numbers on your ticket. This must be a line going across, rather than down or diagonally as in other types of bingo.
An evening well spent? Bingo!
