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For the festival

Diwali Party Games

Diwali is the one night the whole extended family is in one room — grandparents, cousins, the neighbours who dropped in, and four children who will not sit still. The games that work are the ones nobody has to learn.

The trouble is usually logistics rather than enthusiasm. Someone has to buy Tambola tickets in advance. Someone has to remember the rules. Someone ends up being the scorekeeper instead of playing. These are all jobs a phone can do quietly in the background.

Tambola, without buying tickets

Housie is the Diwali standard for a reason: it needs no skill, it scales to thirty people, and everyone can play while still eating. The friction is the paper — tickets bought days ahead, one person calling numbers off a printed sheet, and an argument every time somebody shouts "Full House" a beat too early.

Give everyone their own ticket on their own phone instead. One person calls the numbers, and when someone claims a prize the claim is checked against their actual ticket and the numbers actually called. Right claims are instant; wrong ones are told politely no. Six prizes, including Early Five and Four Corners.

Play Tambola2–30 players · 20–40 min · tickets on every phone

Antakshari, without the arguing

Every Antakshari ends the same way: someone insists a song was already sung, someone else swears it wasn't, and the singing stops for five minutes. Let the phone keep the list. It also holds the letter you have to sing from and the score, so the room can concentrate on the actual singing.

Play Antakshari2–4 teams · Hindi or English letters · keeps the song list

For the younger crowd

When the aunties settle into Tambola, the cousins usually want something faster. Bollywood dumb charades works because the film only ever appears on the acting player's phone — no whispering, no writing on a slip of paper, nobody sent out of the room. And the opposing team picks the film, which is the part that makes it fun.

Play Dumb Charades4–20 players in two teams · 127 films Play Bollywood JeopardyPick a decade — 70s to 2020s · teams take turns

A rough order for the evening

1. Early, while people are still arriving: Antakshari. People can join a team mid-song without anyone re-explaining anything.
2. After dinner, everyone seated: Tambola. It's the one that gets thirty people playing at once.
3. Late, when the group has thinned: charades or Jeopardy, which need a bit more energy and work better with eight than with thirty.

Every game here is free, runs in a browser, and needs no app or sign-up. One person creates a game, shares the link, everyone plays on their own phone.

More for a full house

A Diwali evening runs long and the room keeps changing size, so these are the ones that take latecomers without restarting.

• Most Likely To — everyone votes on who in the room is most likely to — secretly, so nobody follows the crowd.
• The Outsider — everyone sees the secret word except one, and every clue is one word.
• Fibbers — slide a card face down and say what it is; they can call you or look and pass the problem on.
• This or That — one person answers, everyone else guesses what they said; it turns into an argument about who really knows whom.
• The Dial — one person sees a hidden spot between Mild and Spicy and has to name something that sits exactly there.

Playing more than one of these in an evening? Start a lobby — add everyone once and every game you open puts the same people straight into their seats. There is also a new puzzle every day.