About GameHour
GameHour is a free website for playing party games together, each player on their own phone. It has four games, Let's Be Real, Chameleon, Trivia Royale and Lambda, for groups of 2 to 16, and it is built by Bassel Lawand.
Who makes GameHour
GameHour is built by Bassel Lawand. His website, bassellawand.com, lists his other projects.
The games
How GameHour rooms work
- Room codes are 4 characters long and skip look-alike characters (0, O, 1, I and L), so they are easy to read out and type.
- A room holds as many players as its game allows: up to 16 for Trivia Royale, 12 for Let's Be Real, 12 for Lambda and 8 for Chameleon.
- The host picks the settings, starts the game and can remove players. A removed player can't rejoin that room.
- If the host loses connection for 30 seconds, another connected player becomes the host.
- If a player drops out, the game waits 15 seconds for them before moving on, and they can rejoin from the same browser with their score.
- If a game drops below its minimum number of players, it ends.
- After a game, the host can start another one in the same room. Scores reset, and the room skips prompts, cards, spectrums and questions it has already used.
- A room closes 30 minutes after the last player disconnects, and its data is deleted.
What GameHour stores
- There are no accounts and no email sign-up. Your display name, your avatar and a random device key are kept in your browser's local storage, so you don't have to set them up again.
- While a room is open, the server keeps its players, settings, scores and answers. That data is deleted when the room closes.
- Page visits are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and reports visits in aggregate.
How GameHour is built
The website is a React app hosted on Vercel. Each game room runs on Cloudflare in its own Durable Object, which holds the game state, runs the timers and sends each player only what they're allowed to see, such as the secret word in Chameleon or the target in Lambda.