5 free multiplayer browser games to play with friends
This article has been published in partnership with Scala.
The best games to play with friends are those that can be easily picked up and played in short bursts. The type of game that doesn’t have complex rules or barriers to entry; games that anyone can enjoy regardless of how familiar they are with video games.
Below, we’ve picked out five free multiplayer games that you can play in your browser. They cover different genres to suit various moods, from drawing and word games to kart battles and a shooter. In other words, there’s something for everyone, whether your friends want to laugh at bad sketches or settle a grudge with a race.
Gartic Phone
Gartic Phone mixes Pictionary with Broken Telephone. One player writes a sentence and the next player draws it. The player after that has to work out what the drawing represents, and the chain carries on until the final entry is compared with the sentence that started it.
Onrizon Social Games launched Gartic Phone in December 2020, and it now has modes such as Knock-Off, Animation and Crowd on top of the standard format. It runs from its own website in multiple languages, so it works on PCs, tablets and smartphones.
BombParty
BombParty is a typing game on JKLM.FUN, built around a bomb that passes from player to player. You have to get a valid word in before it explodes. The site’s FAQ explains that the fuse starts at a random value between 10 and 30 seconds. Each time a word is validated with less than five seconds left, the timer resets to that five-second minimum (the default setting).
A room holds between two and 16 players, and the party leader sets how many lives each player gets. Using every letter shown on the right-hand side of the screen earns an extra life. There are no JKLM.FUN accounts to make, though you can link Discord or Twitch.
Smash Karts
Smash Karts is the pick if your group would rather blow each other up than draw silly pictures. Despite being called Smash Karts, it’s more of a battle game rather than a race. Matches last three minutes, weapons come out of loot boxes, and every smash adds to your score.
You can play Smash Karts on Poki on desktop, phone or tablet. Private games let you choose the mode, arena, weapons, match length and number of players, with eight modes to pick from, including Capture the Flag and Hat Holder.
skribbl.io
skribbl.io is another drawing game, but this one is a little more simple than Gartic Phone. Each round, one player draws a word they’ve chosen while everyone else races to guess it. Whoever has the most points at the end is crowned the winner.
The site’s changelog shows a 2022 update that raised the cap in custom rooms to 20 players. The same update added mobile support and gave room owners the power to kick or ban players. Hosts can also set how many words the drawer picks from, anywhere between one and five, and reduce hints or switch them off entirely.
Krunker
Krunker is the odd one out: rather than a party-type game, this is a free-to-play first-person shooter that runs in the browser. Swiss developer Sidney de Vries started it in 2018, and by the time FRVR acquired the game it had been played by over 200 million unique players.
The same report notes that Krunker has full modding support and around 50,000 custom maps.
