How to Play Games on a Video Call: FaceTime, WhatsApp, Meet and Zoom

Playing a game on a video call sounds like it should need screen sharing, a second device, or an app you both install. It needs none of those. You need the call to keep running in a corner while a browser tab is open, and a game that syncs between two devices by itself. Here's how to set that up on each kind of device.

The short version

1. Start the call.
2. Leave the call app without hanging up. The video shrinks to a small floating window.
3. Open your browser and start a game.
4. Send the link in the chat. The other person taps it and you're both playing.

On an iPhone

FaceTime does this by default. Swipe up from the bottom to go to the home screen, and the call becomes a small picture-in-picture window you can drag to any corner. Open Safari, go to the game, and play. Tap the little window to go back to the full call.

WhatsApp video calls behave the same way on a recent iPhone. If the video pauses when you leave the app, the audio carries on, which is all a game needs.

On Android

During a WhatsApp, Meet or Messenger call, press the home button or swipe up. The call drops into a floating window. Open Chrome and carry on. If nothing floats, check that picture-in-picture is allowed for that app in your phone's settings, under the app's permissions.

On a laptop

Put the call in one window and the game in another, side by side. On Windows, drag each window to an edge of the screen to snap it to half. On a Mac, hold the green button in the corner of a window and choose a side. This is the most comfortable way to play anything longer than ten minutes.

Why not just share your screen?

Because then only one of you is playing. The other is watching a slightly blurry copy of your screen a second late and telling you where to click. Screen sharing also can't keep a secret: there's no Battleship if your fleet is on a shared screen.

In the arcade you each open the same room on your own device. Moves show up on both screens as they happen, and anything hidden stays on the server until the rules say it can be seen. It also means it works on calls that can't share a screen at all, including an ordinary phone call on speaker.

What to play

For a call you can see each other on, pick games where the reaction is the fun part: How Well Do You Know Me, where you guess each other's answers and both flip over at once, or Battleship, where every shot gets a noise out of the other person.

For five minutes at the start or end of a call, In Sync is one tap a round.

If the connection is bad, play something turn-based like Connect 4. A move is a few bytes and will get through when the video is frozen.

There's a longer list, with a reason for each pick, on games to play over FaceTime and video calls.

If the link opens inside another app

Links tapped in Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp often open in that app's built-in browser. It works, but that browser keeps its own memory, so if you come back to the game later from Safari or Chrome you won't be recognised. If you plan to keep a game going, open the link in your normal browser before you join. The page tells you when that applies.