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Games to play with your long distance partner

Games are the best thing available to long distance couples and most couples pick badly. Here is what works, what does not, and why the time difference should decide more of it than the genre does.

The one thing that decides everything: do you need to be awake together?

Every game for a long distance couple falls on one side of this line, and it matters more than whether the game is any good.

Live games need both of you present at once. They are better when they happen: you get real reactions, interruptions, someone laughing at the wrong moment. Drawing and guessing games, most co-op games, anything with a timer. If you share an evening, build your week around these.

Turn-based games only need you both to show up eventually. One move in the morning, one in their evening. They are less exciting per moment and far more durable over months, and they are the only thing that really works across a large time difference.

Most couples pick a live game, love it for two weeks, then quietly stop, because scheduling it turned out to be the actual game. If you are more than four or five hours apart, start turn-based and treat live sessions as an occasion.

Live games worth the scheduling

• Drawing and guessing. Hard to beat. Bad drawing is funnier than good drawing, so being bad at it is not a problem, and a deck of your own inside jokes turns it into something no one else could play.
• Co-op survival and building games. The long-running kind where you are making a place together. The shared place is doing quiet work here that has nothing to do with the gameplay.
• Asymmetric games where each of you sees different information and has to describe it. Bomb defusal games, escape rooms. These force actual talking, which is the point, and they are the strongest category on this whole page. There is one built into this app if you want to try the shape before you buy anything.
• Quiz games about each other. Answer for yourself, then guess their answer. The best version keeps both sealed until you have both finished, so nobody drifts toward the other's answer.

The best shape: a place only one of you can see

If you only try one kind of game together, try this one. One of you is holding a map. The other one is standing in the dark. Neither of you can do anything alone, and the entire game is the two of you finding the words for where you are.

It works for long distance for a reason that has nothing to do with games: it turns a call into a thing you are doing rather than a thing you are filling. There are long silences in it and none of them are awkward, because you are both busy.

The version in this app is a maze. One of you walks it, seeing a few squares around you and nothing else. The other has the whole map but cannot move. There is a landmark in each part of it, a lamp, a well, a stone, so that you have nouns to point at instead of left and right, which fall apart the moment you are facing each other on a map. Something walks the corridors while you do it. It is slow, deliberately slow, slow enough to see coming, and the whole job of it is to make you decide now rather than eventually.

If you would rather buy one, the genre keywords are asymmetric co-op and one-sided information. Escape room and bomb defusal games are the well known ones.

Turn-based games for a real time difference

• Dots and boxes. Underrated and close to perfect for this. One line a turn, minutes to learn, and the endgame is genuinely tense. A move costs five seconds, so it survives a busy week.
• Word puzzles with a hidden reward. One person hides something behind a word, the other guesses it. Better than a plain word game because solving it gets you something.
• Chess or checkers, one move a day. Slow enough that a game lasts a month, which is a feature.
• Sealed question exchanges. Not a game exactly, but it behaves like one: you both answer, neither can see the other's answer, and it opens on a night you agreed on.

Games to play alone that still help

An underrated category. A lot of long distance is simply waiting: for them to wake up, for a call, for a flight. Something small and solo in the same app you share is oddly comforting, and it works with no signal at all. Sudoku, solitaire, a daily puzzle. Not every part of a shared app has to be shared.

What to look for when picking one

• Can you play it in ten minutes? If a session needs an hour, you will play it four times.
• Does it survive one of you being tired? The best ones are still fine when neither of you is at your best.
• Does losing cost anything real? It should not. Anything where one person falling behind makes it worse for the other is a bad fit for a relationship you are trying to protect.
• Is it free on both your phones? Obvious, and it eliminates most suggestions you will find elsewhere.

A game is not the only shape an evening can take, and it is not always the right one. If what you want is an evening rather than a round, the date ideas are sorted by how much planning each one takes. If what you want is to actually learn something about them, the weekly questions do more in ten minutes than most games do in an hour. And if what you want is to make them smile before they have had coffee, send a letter that opens into flowers. The question version asks them something first, with a No button that runs away from their finger, which is a game of sorts, and one you cannot lose.