Games For Zoom

During these plague times, I've been having weekly Zoom calls with my family, including parent, brothers, sisters, step-siblings, in-laws, nieces, nephews, etc. Among this group is my mother, who is 85, sharp as a tack and game to try new things, but not exactly the digital native that her grandchildren are. Our family loves to play games and it's a big part of what we do during family reunions. Now, every week we play games on Zoom, but doing so means that we have to tackle some technical challenges.

I've googled the heck out of "great games to play on Zoom" but generally I get a list of websites or apps like Jackbox or cardzmania that rely heavily on technology, accounts, etc. What I've been looking for is more "homemade" games that still work on Zoom--and notably that still have analogous look and feel to playing those games in person.

The first game I worked on was Oh Heck, aka Oh Hell, a game that was handed down from generation to generation in my step-family and then graciously passed sideways in the family blending process. After I figured out a way to deal and play the cards, I moved on to other games. This has now become a source of mental challenge and fun for me during what is otherwise a very trying time. Below are the games and our solutions, some of which are way more work than just using Cardzmania, but in a lot of ways also more fun. I'll keep adding as we develop these...

Oh Heck is a card game better known in less delicate circles as Oh Hell. This is a trick-taking game where trump is determined by a turned-up card. Successive hands have different numbers of cards, starting with 8 and going down to 1. Variations can start with a smaller hand (if there are more than 6 people), can go down and back up (because the 1 hand is hard on the dealer), and the large-group version, Double-Deck Cancellation Oh Heck, which ends up as total chaos and is despised by some for its sheer randomness and lack of control. We haven't attempted that yet on Zoom, though we could...

So here's how we do this: I wrote a small R script to deal cards from a standard deck in any configuration of hands and hand size. These hands are written to files, which I then upload to Google Drive and share with the family. The script is here.

On game day, family members have cards available. A couple of my wizard Bridge-playing relatives just look at the cards in the file online, but most of them recreate the hand with their cards. On our end, we basically replicate play using a light box, which looks like this:

The light box was a gift to my husband, who likes photographing food, but it has turned out to be the greatest thing for Zoom games since sliced bread. The box has a built-in bright light (not shown in the photos) that makes everything in the box easy to see, and there is a slot at the top for a webcam. We use an iPad that's also signed into Zoom.

To play, each person on Zoom either shows their card or says it in turn, and we play that card into the box near their nametag. Tricks won are marked by poker chips set on the nametags. While the play is a little slower than in person, it has the same look and feel, and Zoom enables all the same commentary that's so essential to the in-person game ("Really? You had to lead trump?" "Are you sure you want FOUR tricks?" "How dare you trump my off-suit Ace!").