Video chat has never been more popular. It's also never felt particularly spontaneous or organically spur of the moment, with users of many of the biggest services needing to plan their hangouts in advance, share links, or make sure that everyone's devices are supported and ready to go before connecting. These processes can take the fun out of a digital hangout, make it impossible to add additional friends easily, and require tedious additions to software setups to play games or meet new people.
Houseparty looks at video chat differently. Instead of dial-in numbers or platform-specific video call apps, the Houseparty app makes it easy to create a "room," where Housepartiers can come and go as they please. Simply install Houseparty for iOS, Android, macOS, or Chrome, and you'll be able to see which of your contacts are already using the platform to communicate. You can create a room with friends, and other people you know can join and leave these rooms as they please, keeping the conversation moving and endlessly refreshing. With so many people finding business calls long and tiring, Houseparty's perspective is hugely welcome, creating a vastly different experience.
What Makes Houseparty Different
As a user, you can join rooms, see what your friends are up to, and connect with people you haven't talked to in a while. Notifications when your friends are hanging out make Houseparty a uniquely spontaneous chat app, and you may make surprising connections or discover that your mutual friends already know each other.
A Wide Array of Games
Additionally, unlike other video chat platforms, Houseparty is built to emphasize fun. Across the app, you can try out a wide range of games designed to replicate many of the most popular party games that you've probably played in your own home or over the course of a night out with friends.
Be sure to try out Heads Up, where one of your friends can't see the card on screen, but everyone else can. Your friend who can't see the card has to guess what it says by relying on everyone else's clues, hints, and guidance to figure it out. Heads Up provides users with a handful of decks.
In the Houseparty app's Heads Up game, you can play Animals Gone Wild, where players are encouraged to communicate exclusively by making animal noises and actions, much to the amusement of everyone else in the House. There's also Act It Out, where players have to act out the provided clues, which tends to get very silly. #Trending pushes your knowledge of current events and news and puts you in the hot seat to identify people, events, memes, topics, and more from the last week.
There's also Trivia, which takes the classic trivia experience and effortlessly brings it into the digital space like never before, making it easy to host quizzes that test your friends' knowledge on a wide variety of topics. Houseparty has also partnered with popular brands like Fortnite for trivia challenges, with people who are both Houseparty trivia and Fortnite players receiving in-game bonuses for completing a trivia challenge. In fact, the event was so successful that over 20 million questions were answered correctly.
Quick Draw takes inspiration from games like Pictionary, requiring players to create a communicative (or hilariously abstract) sketch of a concept, idea, or word that appears on their screens. Everyone else has to guess what it might be, often to everyone's entertainment.
There's Chips and Guac, the party game that draws inspiration from titles like Apples to Apples. Here, each player has to pick a card that pairs best with a descriptor. This game can reveal a lot about what your friends are thinking, inspire a whole lot of laughter, and create some truly astounding idea pairings. It's fast paced, addictive, and lots of fun, and it breaks up the monotony of boring video chats like nothing else.
Recent additions include a Houseparty-friendly version of UNO, Mattel's Magic classic Magic 8-Ball, and Word Racers, where players have to spell as many words as possible using one predetermined set of letters.
