Free browser-based games for groups and solo play — pass the screen, tap for the next word, and keep going.
Party games don't need an app. These tools run in any browser and work on your phone. Pick a game and pass the screen around.
Pass the phone. No app required.
Solo or together.
Play, solve, and look up every answer.
Questions, jokes, and icebreakers.
There are a lot of different games you can play with a phone at a party. These games are generally quite social and are best played as reactions to another player. Would You Rather, for example, or a game of Truth or Dare. Someone is in charge of the game and uses their phone to present questions or challenges to other players. The games can be quite silly and often cause arguments or embarrassment. There's not a lot of setup involved with these kinds of games: just tap the screen to continue. Similarly, you can play Hangman or word searches solo on your daily commute.
For games like Would You Rather and Truth or Dare and even Catchphrase, a phone is much better than a dedicated app because the generator can handle the pacing of the game, but you handle the shouting. For games like these, you just need one person to read the question or word that appears on their screen out loud to the rest of the group.
Charades and Pictionary require a different constraint: the person drawing or acting shouldn't know the word(s) the other(s) know before they do. The generators for these games are designed to reveal words on demand, one at a time. Thus, you can hand the phone over to the next player without the entire group having seen what's coming. Scattergories and word searches are designed for groups but are also very much suitable for solo use. They are often used by teachers for teaching vocabulary in classrooms and for students of English as a Second Language (ESL).
Play a variety of games throughout the evening, such as Pictionary and Catchphrase, or read out Would You Rather questions.
Teachers use games like Scattergories and Pictionary for vocabulary and Charades for comprehension in ESL classes.
All of the games are client-side, meaning that once the page loads, you can play without an internet connection. Pass the phone and keep playing.
No, all game logic and word lists are embedded within a single page. That page can then be played offline by putting your phone in Airplane mode. Only the initial page load requires a connection to the internet.
The number of players depends on the game. Truth or Dare, Would You Rather, and Catchphrase are best played with two people and get even better with more. Pictionary and Charades need at least three players, one of them drawing or acting. The rest of the players try to guess what the actor/drawer wants to say/represent. The Scattergories player can play alone or against other players; the word search and the Mad Libs tools can be used by one player.
Most of the tools here have an audience filter and/or a difficulty filter. For example, Truth or Dare has a kids mode with very tame prompts. Charades has a category filter (animals, movies, celebrities, actions etc.). Pictionary words are sorted by difficulty tier. Would You Rather has a setting for difficulty that can be set to "mild" to play a more gentle game of Would You Rather with kids. Scattergories and word search tools are suitable for any age.
Many of the tools have support for categories (e.g., Charades has categories for animals, movies, celebrities, actions, etc. – Pictionary has words sorted by difficulty tier – Truth or Dare has support for filtering by audience type, etc.). For Scattergories, you can get a full list of categories with a random starting letter. Individual tools have more details on what filters are supported.