Music games to play with friends online

Almost every browser game a group plays together is drawing or trivia. The music ones exist, but they are scattered, and they are not all the same kind of thing — a song-guessing game and a beat-making game share a category and nothing else. Here is the whole shape of it.

The three kinds

Sorting them by what the group actually does is more useful than sorting by name, because it tells you which one fits the evening you are having.

• Guessing games. Somebody hears a clip and races to name it. Fast, loud, and entirely dependent on everyone sharing a back catalogue — which is why they fall apart across an age gap.
• Naming and trivia games. Same problem, slower. Good with a group that already argues about music.
• Making games. Everybody produces something and the group judges it. No shared back catalogue needed, because nothing is being recalled — it is being invented.

The third kind is much rarer, and it is the one that survives a mixed group. Nobody is excluded for not knowing the song, because there is no song yet.

What each one asks of you

Why guessing games get old and making games do not

A guessing game has a fixed answer, so the second time a clip comes round it is worth nothing. The library ages, the group learns it, and the game quietly stops working. It is also the format that most reliably leaves one person out — the friend who does not listen to what everybody else listens to spends the evening losing to a fact about other people's taste.

A making game has no answers in it. The same prompt produces something different every time because the thing being tested is what the group invents, not what it remembers. That is also why it does not age: there is no library to exhaust.

The setup problem

The real filter on a group game is not how good it is, it is how long it takes to start. Anything with an install, an account per person, or a store page loses half the group before the first round. The ones that work are a link somebody pastes into a chat.

This is where music games have historically been worse than drawing games. A drawing game needs a canvas; a music game has usually needed either a licensed catalogue or software on everybody's machine. Browser audio got good enough to remove the second requirement somewhere around the point most of these games stopped being written.

How many people

Guessing games scale up almost indefinitely — everybody answers at once, so a twentieth player costs nothing. Making games do not, because every entry has to be listened to, and listening is serial. Four to six is where a making game sits: enough variety that each entry is a surprise, few enough that the playback does not become a recital.

If you want the making kind

GrooveArena is that: everybody in the room gets the same randomly rolled tempo and eight empty bars, four minutes to fill them, and then the room listens back and rates each one out of five. Nobody hears anybody else while they build, which is what makes the playback worth sitting through.

It needs no account for a private room and nothing installed, and the drums are a grid of squares — which is the part that decides whether a game like this is playable by a group rather than by musicians. Someone who has never made music has something that sounds deliberate inside two minutes.