How to create a party room

What you need before you start

Less than people expect, and it is worth checking rather than discovering halfway through. There is no download, no account and no card, so this list is genuinely the whole list.

• One screen the room can see. A laptop propped at the end of the table, a television, or a shared window in a video call. It does not need to be big. It needs to be readable without anybody leaning.
• A phone each, with any browser on it. Age and make do not matter, and nobody installs anything.
• 3 people. That is the minimum a room will start with, and it is a real floor rather than a suggestion: the button stays disabled until the third person is in.
• About twenty seconds. That is the honest figure for you. Add roughly ten each for everybody else.

Creating the room, step by step

1. 1Go to playantics.com/party on that device and find the create form. It is the second card down, under the box for joining a room somebody else opened.
2. 2Name the party, or skip it. The name exists only so a screen across the room says "Friday night" rather than six characters. Leave it blank and the room calls itself Party, which is fine and nobody has ever commented on it.
3. 3Build the list of what you might play. Every game explains itself on its card: how it actually goes, how many people it wants and roughly how long it runs, so you can put one on the list without having played it. There is nothing to drag: the arrows on each card move it up or down the running order, which is the order the night will actually run in.
4. 4Or skip that entirely. A room opens perfectly well with nothing on its list, and the same builder is waiting in the lobby, where you can add games and reorder them with the group in front of you.
5. 5Press Open the room. The room exists from that moment, and you are looking at the host screen.

That is the entire setup. Everything else worth deciding is settled in the lobby with the group actually in front of you, which is when the answers are known: how many rounds, which categories, what the running order really wants to be, and whether anybody is still in the kitchen. Nothing starts on its own, including the game the room runs itself, so a room can sit in its lobby for as long as the party needs it to.

What ticking a game actually does

The list is doing two different jobs at once and the difference catches people out. One game on it runs inside the room, dealing each phone something private that the shared screen must never show. Everything else on the list is a pass-the-phone game the room does not try to run: it links out to that game's own page and keeps the score for it while you play, so an evening that moves between the sofa and everyone's phones still finishes with one running total instead of three unrelated ones.

The practical consequence: if you deliberately untick the room's own game and tick only pass-the-phone ones, you get a room that keeps score and never runs anything itself. That is a legitimate way to use it and the lobby says so plainly, but it surprises a first-time host who expected a Start button. If you want the room to run a game, leave that one ticked or tick nothing at all.

The other half of that is worth knowing before you press the button: the list is fixed when the room opens. You can ignore anything on it, but you cannot add a game you did not tick without opening a new room. When in doubt, tick more than you think you need. There is no cost to an unplayed entry.

Getting everybody in

The host screen shows three ways in at once, side by side. They are not interchangeable, and picking the right one for the room you are actually in is most of the difference between everybody being in inside a minute and a slow, fiddly five.

Read the code out

Six characters, printed large and split into two groups of three so it survives being read across a noisy room. For a group in one place this is almost always the fastest, and it is the only one of the three that reaches somebody whose phone is still in their pocket.

The part nobody expects is that the alphabet is rigged in your favour. Codes are drawn from a set with no vowels in it and no 0 or 1, which quietly removes the two arguments this kind of code normally causes. Nobody has to ask whether that was a letter O or a zero, because neither character can appear, and a code can never accidentally spell a word at somebody's expense.

Point a camera at the QR code

It sits beside the code on the host screen and goes straight to the room, so there is nothing to type. Good for anybody sitting where they can see the screen. It needs line of sight and a working camera app, which makes it the weakest of the three over a video call, where guests are looking at a compressed stream of somebody else's screen rather than at your television.

Send the link

There is a Share the link button that opens your phone's share sheet, or copies the link if the browser has no share sheet to open. It is the right tool in two specific cases: somebody is joining from another house on purpose, or the room is loud enough that reading six characters aloud has already failed twice.

For everyone else in the room, the code beats it, and not only on speed. A link travels further than the room it was made for. There is a fuller version of that argument on the party room page itself, under the heading about reading the code out.

What the first two minutes look like

Names appear on the shared screen as people arrive, and the count above them is the thing to watch. It saves the host asking whether everybody is in, which is a question that never gets a reliable answer at a party.

Each person types a nickname and nothing else. No email, no password, no account. Before they commit to it their phone tells them how many people are already in the room, which is what makes a mistyped code obvious immediately rather than one screen later.

When something goes wrong

Somebody's phone says the party has ended

Nine times in ten this is a mistyped code rather than a dead room, and the two need different responses. Read the code off the shared screen again slowly before assuming anything is broken. The code field refuses characters that cannot appear in a code as they are typed, so a genuine slip usually shows up as a code that is too short rather than one that is wrong.

You closed the host tab

Reopen the same browser on the same device, go back to the host address, and it still knows you. What does not work is a different browser, a different device, or a private window that has since been closed, because the proof that you are the host lives in that one browser's storage and there is no account anywhere to check it against. That is the trade for there being no account to make in the first place.

There is currently no way to hand host control to somebody else's device. If the host has to leave, the practical answer is to open a fresh room on the device that is staying.

The same person is on the screen twice

Usually one person who joined on their phone and again on a laptop. The host controls can take a row out, and there are deliberately two ways to do it. Went home keeps the name and the score on the board, which is right for somebody who was winning when their taxi arrived. Remove takes the name off the shared screen entirely, which is what you want when the name itself is the problem.

Both are undoable from a list in the host controls, so neither one stops to ask you if you are sure. That is on purpose: a confirmation dialog costs the host seconds at the one moment they have none.

Can you reuse a code?

No, and it is worth knowing before anybody writes one on a whiteboard for next week. Every room gets a fresh code, and a room clears itself about a day after it opened, taking every name and answer in it. There is nothing to cancel, no room list to tidy up and nothing to delete afterwards, because nothing was ever attached to a person. Next week's party is a new room, and it costs exactly what this one did.