Games to play with close friends who think they know everything
Games for your oldest friends. The ones that test how well you really know each other, reward inside jokes and restart arguments you've had for years.
Playing games with close friends is a different thing. You don’t need icebreakers, and nobody needs to be eased in. What you want are games that use everything you already know about each other, and ideally prove one of you wrong.
These are the ones we’d pick for an evening with the people who’ve known you longest.
Find out who really knows whom
How Well Do You Know Me? was more or less made for this. One person sits in the hot seat and answers a question about themselves, and everyone else guesses what they picked. There’s a pack of questions for friends, but the good stuff comes from the questions you write yourselves before the game, about one specific friend or about anyone.
At the end there’s a friendship map showing who knows whom best, with badges like Open Book and Soulmates. Nobody wants to be the best friend who scored lowest. Somebody will be.
Turn inside jokes into points
Outwit the AI is much better with close friends than with anyone else. Everyone gets a secret word from a board, and you write a clue your friends will understand but the AI won’t. The AI reads the same clues at the same time and makes its own guess.
The trick is shared history. A clue like “what Ali ordered in Lisbon” means nothing to the AI and everything to the three people who were there. With close friends you have years of material. It’s a very satisfying way to beat a computer.
Trust, and a bit of betrayal
Blind Card is a game about who you believe. You can see everyone’s card except your own, and the only way to find out yours is to ask the others in private whispers. Everyone can see who is whispering to whom, but not what was said. Turn on the Jack and one of you is secretly working to make the others guess wrong.
With people you’ve known for years this gets personal quickly, because you know exactly who would lie to you and enjoy it.
Faker has a similar edge. Close friends know each other’s tells, which makes bluffing harder and catching the faker more satisfying. Try the Undercover mode, where the faker gets a slightly different word and doesn’t know they’re the faker.
Restart the old arguments
Every friend group has debates that never really end. Feed them.
Tier List gives you a category, like films or food, and everyone ranks it from S to F in secret. Then the group’s list is revealed, along with the item that split the room most. You already know who’s going to defend the indefensible.
Song Battles settles music taste, or tries to. Two players get a theme, each picks a song, and everyone else votes without knowing whose is whose. At the end you get a recap of every song from the night. Expect at least one friend to claim the vote was rigged.
For a long night in
If you’ve got the whole evening, play something with a story. Vanished is a detective game for 3 to 6 players: a treasure is missing and you question each other until someone can name the suspect, the place and the method. Truth Be Told is cooperative, with everyone holding a different piece of the same event. Close friends are surprisingly bad at it, because everyone assumes they know what the others mean.
Games with nothing but each other
- Who’s most likely to. Someone reads out a “who’s most likely to…” and everyone points at the same time. Simple, and occasionally brutal.
- Two truths and a lie. Much harder with people who know your life story, which is exactly the fun of it.
- Hot seat. One person, five minutes, any question goes, and they can pass once. Old friends always find a question nobody has asked before.
Getting everyone in
The phone games above all run on Guezzer. One person opens a room, the rest join with the code, the link or the QR code. It works on the sofa together or on a call when half the group has moved away.
