How to run game night over a video call
Latency, lobbies, and other enemies of fun.
Video call game night fails for boring, fixable reasons, not because the games are wrong for it. The biggest one is latency: if even one person is on a connection running half a second behind, every "go" and every reveal gets contested. Test it before you start. Have everyone say a word at the same time and see if it lands together. If it doesn't, close some tabs, or accept that person is quietly calling the shots on timing all night.
Second: whoever creates the game lobby becomes the de facto host, whether they want the job or not, so hand that link to someone who'll actually read the rules screen instead of clicking through it. And put one person (not "whoever notices") in charge of the shared timer. A countdown that only exists on the host's screen is a countdown nobody else trusts.
None of this is exciting advice; we learned it the boring way, by pasting a lobby link into the wrong group chat and starting without half the people who were supposed to be in the game. It's also the difference between a video call that turns into a game night and one that turns into six people asking "wait, did that count?" for forty-five minutes.