I hosted a games night with the help from AI and here’s how you can too

I always love game night with friends. We have an ever-expanding roster of board games, card games, and party games to choose from, which makes each get-together different. On a recent evening, though, I wanted to try using AI as the virtual host of the games.

I asked ChatGPT for some ideas and to be the one actually running three different kinds of games. The chaos that followed showed me that game master is a role AI can play pretty well, though you’ll need to keep a close watch at first.

Here’s how ChatGPT did as host of game night.

AI Trivia

A group of friends playing trivia.

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Trivia games are an easy option for incorporating AI, and they are a real crowd-pleaser, especially because having ChatGPT ask the questions meant we could all play simultaneously.

To set it up, I asked ChatGPT to act as quizmaster for a game night. I then gave the AI some broad subjects for question topics, including space, cooking, and 90s pop culture, and told it to come up with more. Then, I instructed it to come up with ten questions for each and keep track of our submitted scores.

I also told the AI to have some fun as a quizmaster and show some personality, and it immediately became a gameshow host with over-the-top praise and cheesy jokes. That was nice, but honestly, not having any of us needing to referee or prepare questions made for a much faster jump into actually playing games. That said, there were a few questions that were either too easy or hard, but it showed me that I need to be specific about the difficulty level in the future.

Virtual Pictionary

A group of friends playing Pictionary.

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Pictionary is a classic game night activity, but not all of us are the best artists, so I decided to enlist ChatGPT and its DALL-E image generator. Instead of going back and forth to guess, I explained the concept to ChatGPT and had it start drawing pictures by pen one line at a time, with a chance for the group to guess after each line.

It took a while to guess “a cat riding a unicycle on Mars” or “a dinosaur baking a cake,” but seeing the final weird illustrations was a lot of fun. We then came up with a variation of the game. Each person had to guess what the AI had drawn in a somewhat abstract form. If they guessed wrong, they had to try drawing their interpretation of the image on a whiteboard and see if they were any better based on the rest of the group’s guesses. Nobody got “a giraffe wearing a crown,” with a confused llama being the closest we got. The group did work out my drawing of a “robot doing yoga,” even though I couldn’t figure it out from the AI’s drawing.

AI Murder Mystery

A group of friends around a table.

(Image credit: Shutterstock)

We decided to cap off the night with a more complex party game: a murder mystery. This one didn’t require much direction from me. I asked ChatGPT to craft a custom murder mystery story for the game. I provided the AI with a basic premise: the host (me) was the victim, and each of my five friends was a suspect with a unique motive.

ChatGPT quickly spun an intricate tale: I was “poisoned” during a celebratory toast, and everyone had a reason to want me out of the picture. For instance, one friend loves space and supposedly wanted revenge because I canceled her stargazing trip. Another friend became a famous foodie who was angry I’d mocked his lasagna because it was a bit burnt.

I printed out the character profiles and clues that ChatGPT generated and handed them out. The AI suggested props, so I set up a small “evidence table” with a bottle of “poison,” aka apple juice, and a crumpled note that said, “It’s your turn.” Everyone got into character, grilling each other and forming wild theories. Ultimately, the killer turned out to be the quietest friend, who did it because I forgot her birthday last year.

Everyone loved playing detective, and the twists were genuinely surprising, but the backstory could be a little confusing and contradictory without some editing. Of all the games, this was probably the best received and one I can’t wait to do again soon.