Play Apart

A web app for playing Werewolf and other social party games online with your friends

Play Apart was born out of a necessity to continue playing fun party games with my friends. When COVID hit and we went into a worldwide lock down everything went remote, including our bi-monthly office game nights. There are plenty ways to game online thanks to services like Steam, but for the folks who played more casually, they were left out.

I hosted a game of Werewolf for my colleagues, making them mute themselves and turn off their cameras during the night phase, and using Slack to communicate with them privately. This worked fine but I couldn't partake as the game required me to moderate the process. I did a search for any tools that could handle these things for us, but could find nothing out there that fit the bill. I made a simple generator for randomizing roles, but the rest of the process was still largely manual.

So over the following few weeks I built Play Apart to do exactly that - it automates the entire process of assigning user roles, turning of cameras during the night phase and keeping track of who has died along the way.

Play Apart was taken offline on June 23rd 2021 to save myself the cost of hosting. It was a fun experiment and I learned a lot about WebRTC.