Gaming with Your Contacts for a Terrific Time

Set you and your friends up and play all kinds of fantastic games right from the comfort of your favorite chat apps! There's more to chatting than just chatting!

So you’ve gotten started in the world of chatting. If you haven’t settled on an app yet, our guide on choosing a chat app is worth a look first. Either way, you’ve made yourself some friends or reconnected with older ones. Your online persona is all set, and you’re now basking in the all-capable glow of your computer or phone screen. But now that you’re actually talking to people regularly, you might realize that you don’t share everything in common. Maybe some of your friends watch all the latest movies, some of them listen to the same music as you, but everyone is different in their own way. And if you talk to someone all the time, you’re bound to eventually run out of topics.

Now what? You don’t want the conversation to fizzle out here after you’ve worked hard enough to build it up in the first place.

And that’s where it gets even better. Sure, chatting is cool, meeting new people is fun, and finding people with similar interests never gets boring, but there’s so much more to this whole world of communication than just typing back and forth.

Did you know that there are also hundreds of games available online, built directly into the apps you already use? And we don’t mean games you need to buy or download separately, like on a console or through an app store. We mean right there, inside some of your favorite chat apps. Many people aren’t aware there’s so much more to these apps beyond plain chatting. So if you ever start to feel bored mid-conversation, just pop open a game with a friend, challenge them to beat your score, or team up on something together. Best of all, if none of your current friends want to play, you can always find people from communities dedicated to these exact games.

Let’s take a look at the major chat apps and the types of games each one offers.

Facebook Messenger

One of the most popular chat apps of all time, the classic Facebook Messenger also has one of the biggest libraries of games to play with friends. It essentially pioneered the world of online social games, with titles you may have heard of, like Farmville, Backyard Monsters, and Happy Aquarium. That was a while ago now, though. While some of those older games are still active with millions of monthly players, the popularity of Messenger’s newer, built-in Instant Games has grown enormously thanks to their simplicity and social value.

The games in Facebook Messenger tend to be quite simple, and many of them are based on mobile games you may already play elsewhere. One of the most popular is EverWing, where you play as a dragon trainer shooting monsters out of the sky. It lets you invite friends to help you fight bosses, and it also works directly inside your group chats, so everyone can pitch in simultaneously without leaving the conversation. There are always new updates and new content rolling out, giving your friend group something fresh to talk about too.

That’s far from the only game available on Facebook Messenger, either. There are tons of them, built around simple ideas like tossing a basketball into a hoop or scoring soccer goals into a net. These games are great for killing time, but they also double as a fun, low-stakes way to challenge your friends and prove you’re better than them at something completely trivial. You can read all about different Facebook Messenger games over at Techcrunch, and find the right ones for you and your friends.

Kik Messenger

There are games in Kik Messenger as well. If you already use Kik, you probably know about bots, since they tend to show up while you’re looking for new friends. Bots are another great way to have fun — some hold a casual conversation with you, others take you on a full text adventure. But a lot of people don’t realize you can also add bots directly to your group chats.

Depending on the bot you add, there may be some quirky interactions or bugs, since many bots are built to handle one conversation at a time rather than a whole group. But plenty of bots are explicitly designed for group play, letting you game with all your friends at once. These games can be quite simple, like guessing a number, but there are also bots built for trivia, truth or dare, or even a full round of Connect Four if you’re in the mood for something more strategic. There are all kinds of Kik bots you can use for games — browse the games section at ChatBottle to find something you’re interested in, and set up a game night for your Kik group chats.

Discord

Discord is an app built for gamers as an alternative to other voice comms, so naturally, gaming is a major part of the community, and you should never have much trouble finding people to play with. That said, Discord itself doesn’t ship with any games built directly into it. Instead, people started inventing ways to play games on Discord through the use of Discord bots. If you’re part of any larger Discord servers, you’ve probably already run into a few. While staff members like moderators and admins often use bots to keep a server in check, there are also plenty of features available to regular members too.

On bigger servers, there’s usually a dedicated channel for bot commands or bot games. To figure out what a given bot can do, they typically have a help command of some kind, often visible right in the bot’s status — something like “!help” or “?help.” Send that command, and it’ll reply with a full list of things you can do, usually including a section dedicated to games, and some of them are genuinely a lot of fun.

You’ll find games like trivia, where a bot shows a character from a TV show or movie and you have to guess who it is, with whoever answers fastest winning the round. It doesn’t stop there, either — plenty of bot games run on their own credits system as a reward, complete with item shops and customizable profiles you can build out over time. Reading through a bot’s available commands will usually reveal all kinds of features you didn’t expect, and every bot is a little different, so there’s more to explore than you might think. For a great list of Discord bots worth adding to your own servers, check out Discordbots.org.

Google Play

Ah, the classic social and gaming backbone from Google. Google offers all kinds of services, but its Play network is seamlessly woven into a huge range of games on the Play Store. If you use any of Google’s chat services, you might already be somewhat familiar with Google Play Games without realizing it.

When you download an online game to your Android phone (or even play one through a web browser), you may be prompted to log in with your Google account. That gets you set up with Google Play Games, letting you track your achievements and scores while syncing your progress across multiple devices. Since it’s built around your existing Google contacts, you’ll automatically have people you already know available to challenge or invite into the games you play.

Because Google Play Games draws from the wider Play Store catalog, the games available tend to be more elaborate, a bit more complex, and far more varied than the lightweight games baked into chat apps like Messenger or Kik. If you already play some top-rated games from the Play Store, there’s no adjustment needed — just log into Google Play Games and you’ll find your existing friends already there, ready to be challenged.

iMessage Games

If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, there’s a good chance you’ve already stumbled across the Game Pigeon iMessage extension, or something similar. These small games live directly inside your iMessage conversations, tucked behind the little App Store icon next to the text field. Once you’ve got a game extension installed, you can challenge whoever you’re chatting with to a round without ever leaving the conversation thread.

The games here tend to lean toward quick, turn-based classics: mini golf, 8-ball, checkers, word games, and trivia are all common. Because everything happens asynchronously inside the same thread you’re already texting in, it’s an easy way to keep a slow-burning conversation alive over the course of a day without either of you needing to be actively online at the same time. It’s a particularly nice option for long-distance friendships or family group chats where everyone’s schedules rarely line up.

Why gaming together actually strengthens friendships

It’s easy to treat these built-in games as a novelty, but there’s a real reason they tend to stick around in group chats long after the initial excitement wears off: shared activities give a friendship structure. Talking constantly eventually runs out of new topics, as we mentioned earlier, but playing something together creates fresh moments to react to in real time — a lucky shot, a dramatic loss, an unexpected comeback. Those small shared experiences give you something to talk about that isn’t just “how was your day,” and they tend to be exactly the kind of inside jokes that keep a friend group close over the long run.

Games also lower the pressure of a conversation. Not every interaction needs to be a deep, meaningful exchange — sometimes trading turns in a quick round of trivia is exactly the right amount of contact to maintain a friendship without it feeling like a chore to keep up with.

This matters even more for friendships that have drifted a little. Reaching out after months of silence with “hey, how have you been?” can feel like a lot of pressure to reopen a conversation properly. Sending a game challenge instead is a much lower-stakes way back in — it doesn’t demand a full catch-up right away, and it often ends up leading to one naturally once the game gets going.

Getting started tonight

If none of this is already part of your routine, the easiest way to start is to pick just one app you and a friend both already use, and try one game from it this week rather than trying to explore everything at once. Send a challenge instead of a “what’s up” text and see where the conversation goes from there. More often than not, a single round turns into a standing weekly habit without either of you really planning it that way.

It’s also worth asking your group chat directly what games people have already tried. Chances are someone in the group has already found a favorite bot or built-in game that the rest of you have never noticed, sitting there the whole time.

Set up a recurring game night

Rather than leaving gaming with friends to spontaneous moments, it’s worth actually scheduling a recurring slot — even just once every two weeks. Treat it the same way you’d treat a standing coffee date: put it on the calendar, and let it become a habit rather than something that only happens when everyone happens to be free at the same time by coincidence. Groups that schedule this way tend to actually follow through far more consistently than groups that just say “we should game sometime” and never quite land on a date.

Mix it up between games

Sticking to the exact same game every single time can eventually make even a favorite start to feel like a chore rather than a treat. Rotating between two or three different games, or letting a different person pick each session, keeps things feeling fresh and gives everyone in the group a chance to introduce something new to the rest. It also means nobody feels stuck playing something they’ve grown tired of, just because it was the group’s original pick months ago.

Conclusion

To summarize, there are tons of opportunities to play all kinds of cool games with your friends across all your favorite chat apps. There’s no real limit to it, since new games are released for these platforms constantly. There will always be something new to try, and that alone can make your overall chatting experience a lot more fun.

But remember, you don’t always have to keep things confined to the games built into your current app. You can always ask your friends if they want to play something away from the app entirely, or invite them over to a different platform built specifically for gaming. Or maybe they’ll be the ones to invite you somewhere new. Either way, it’s a great way to discover new communities, new games, and plenty of new friends along the way — so don’t miss out on the opportunities sitting right there in your existing chats. If you’re looking for something with a bit more depth, our list of online games to play with friends and family is worth a look too.