Texting Games to Play with Friends: How to Play & Example Texts

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Want to add a little excitement and laughter to texting exchanges with your friends, crush, or significant other? Just play a game! Games are fun, engaging, and perfect for chasing the boredom away—not to mention they can help you get to know someone better. Here’s a list of the best texting games, along with a handy guide to each one and text examples.

Things You Should Know

Play guessing games like Trivia, 20 Questions, or Friendship Tag to test one another’s knowledge.
Make one another laugh with funny games like Story Time (which allows you to tell a collaborative story) or Guess the Sound.
Flirt while playing games like Kiss, Marry, Kill, and Truth or Dare, which help you get to know your crush (and their tastes) a little better.

Trivia

Trivia allows you and a friend to test each other’s knowledge. Pick a topic with your friend to start. Try to agree on a topic you both find interesting (and potentially have lots of obscure knowledge about!) Then, take turns asking one another trivia questions about that topic. Each correct answer gets a point, and whoever gets 10 points first wins the game. Say you and your friend are both movie buffs. You might ask questions like, “What is the skyscraper's name in Die Hard?” or “How many suns does Luke's home planet Tatooine have in Star Wars?”

20 Questions

20 Questions is an easy-to-play guessing game to play with friends. To play 20 Questions, simply think of something, whether it’s an object, place, or person. Then allow your friend to ask “yes” or “no” questions to try and guess what you’re thinking of in 20 questions or less. Then, switch roles and have them think of something secret while you ask the questions! For example, if you’re thinking of your favorite dessert (chocolate cake), then you might answer “No” to questions like, “Is it alive?” and “yes” to questions like, “Can you eat it?” When you’re asking the questions, start by trying to narrow down the category. For example, you might ask questions like “Is it an animal?” or “Is it a famous person?”

Friendship Tag

See how well you and your friends know one another in Friendship Tag. Take turns asking a series of questions about yourselves—questions that only a true friend (or significant other) might know. Let the other person answer and then tally up each others’ scores to see how well you both did. The person with the highest score wins! You might ask questions like, “What color are my eyes?” “What’s my favorite movie?” and “How many siblings do I have?” If you ask 5 questions and get 4 right, they’d have 4 points. If you answered all 5 of their questions correctly, that means you’d win with 5 points. To add excitement to the game, try timing one another’s answers.

In Character

Test your acting skills and pop culture knowledge by playing In Character. This is another fun guessing game to play with friends! Pick a character or celebrity and have the other person do the same. Then, start texting each other in character with quips and catchphrases your character would say. Whoever can stay in character the longest without their character being guessed wins. If you picked Yoda from Star Wars, you might start texting the way he speaks and say things like, “Try to guess who I am, you must!” You could impersonate Regina George from Mean Girls and text her iconic quote, “Get in, loser, we’re going shopping!”

I Spy

Use your creativity and descriptive skills to play I Spy over text. Normally, the game is played in person, but that shouldn’t stop you from using text to play I Spy instead! Pick something you can see; it should be something from the room you’re in, not something you can look up online. Then, text the other person, “I spy…” followed by a vague description, and let them try to guess what it is. You: “I spy something clear.” Them: “Is it a glass?” You: “No!”

Kiss, Marry, Kill

Learn more about a friend’s romantic tastes in Kiss, Marry, Kill. Choose 3 people; they could be characters, celebrities, or even other friends of yours. Then, text your friend, “Kiss, Marry, Kill,” and list those 3 characters. Your friend’s job is to decide which person they want to kiss, marry, and kill from that list. Take turns and have your friend do the same for you! Draw from shows and movies you both like. For example, you might text a Lord of the Rings fan, “Kiss, Marry, Kill: Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli.” Suggest some silly options, too! For instance, Fred, Shaggy, and Velma (Scooby Doo), or SpongeBob, Squidward, and Mr. Crabs (SpongeBob SquarePants).

Riddles

Enjoy a few puzzling brain-teasers by playing a game of riddles. The game is simple: text a friend and take turns asking each other riddles. You each have a set number of guesses per riddle (you can decide the number), and if you guess correctly, you win! Example riddles include: What month of the year has 28 days? (Answer: All of them) What is a question you can never answer yes to? (Answer: Are you asleep?) What can’t talk but will reply when spoken to? (Answer: An echo) Try increasing the difficulty of the riddles as you progress to give your friend a challenge.

Emoji Translation

Explore different emoji meanings by playing Emoji Translation. Are you and your friend or crush a fan of emojis? Send them a series of emojis that tells a secret story, and have them try to decipher what the emojis mean. Once they guess correctly, it’s their turn to send an emoji message. This is also a great way to get a little flirty with your crush or significant other! For example, you could send a funny combination like “????‍♀️✋” (Talk to the hand) or “????????????” (Between a rock and a hard place). You might invite your crush over by sending “????????❄️,” (Netflix and chill) or text them, “????????????” (You’re hot!)

Storytime

Play Storytime to flex your collaborative storytelling skills with a friend. Either you or your friend can begin the story with a single sentence. Then, the other person adds another line to the story. Continue taking turns adding a sentence until you decide to stop—or your story finds a natural stopping point. Create a first sentence that sets the scene. For example, “Once there was a princess who lived in a tower…” or “One day, a budgie decided to move away from home to the big city!” Build the story piece by piece with every sentence you add. “One day, the princess got bored and decided to escape the tower to go skiing!” It’s up to you and your friend whether you want to keep the story realistic or throw away all the rules and get ridiculous.

Truth or Dare

Get to know someone you like by playing Truth or Dare. Decide who will go first, then take turns asking your friend (or a crush), “Truth or Dare?” When either of you picks “Truth,” the other person will ask a question that must be answered truthfully. When you pick “Dare,” the other person issues a challenge that must be completed. Good “truth” questions include: “What is your biggest fear?” “What’s something nobody knows about you?” or “Who are you crushing on?” Fun dares that work over text include: “Take a goofy selfie!” or “Make up a poem about your crush.” Be sure to set some ground rules beforehand, so neither of you asks a question or makes a dare that makes the other uncomfortable. Nobody should do something they don’t want to do!

Would You Rather?

Learn something new about your crush and their preferences. Ask a question that begins with “Would you rather…?” Give the other person 2 options and allow them to pick one of the options. Start with a simple question, and then pose more bizarre questions as the game progresses—and, of course, answer their questions too. “Would you rather live in a treehouse or a cave?” “Would you rather detect every lie you hear or get away with every lie you tell? “Would you rather sell all of your possessions or sell one of your organs?”

Never Have I Ever

Discover your friends’ wildest adventures by playing Never Have I Ever. Take turns texting something that you’ve never done before. If you or the other person has done that thing, indicate that either by simply saying so (“I’ve done that!”) or by sending an emoji like “✋.” Also, set some sort of punishment whenever you or the other person has done the deed in question. “Never have I ever stolen anything!” “Never have I ever gone skinny dipping.” “Never have I ever eaten an entire pizza by myself.” When playing Never Have I Ever in person, the punishment is usually taking a sip of your drink. However, you could use a different punishment—like deducting a point or sending an embarrassing selfie.

Most Likely To

Play Most Likely To and have fun with a group chat full of friends. Pose a question to your group chat, asking which person in the group is most likely to do something. Then, allow everyone in the group chat to debate and decide who they think it is. Try asking progressively more absurd questions to make the game funny! “Who is most likely to spend all their money on something stupid?” “Who is most likely to poison someone with their awful cooking accidentally?” “Who is most likely to get lost in their own hometown?” You could also ask the “most likely” questions about celebrities or characters. For example, “Who is most likely to get thrown out of a club: Garfield or Donald Duck?”

Name the Song

Learn about one another’s musical tastes by playing Name the Song. Text a song lyric to your friend or crush and have them try to guess the name of the song. If they guess correctly, they get a point. Alternatively, play with a whole group chat full of friends, and the winner is the person who correctly names the song first. “Making my way downtown, walking fast, faces pass and I’m homebound.” (A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton) “You are my fire, the one desire…” (I Want It That Way by the Backstreet Boys) “I walk a lonely road, the only one that I have ever known.” (Boulevard Of Broken Dreams by Green Day)

Guess the Sound

Guess the Sound is a great game for goofing around with GIFs. Start by texting the other person a GIF that is associated with a particular sound, like a line of dialogue in a TV show or an animal making noise. Then, have the other person text you a voice message and imitate what they think the correct sound is—and then switch roles, so you’re the one guessing. For example, you might send a GIF of Homer Simpson yelling, “D’oh!” To win, the other person would have to send a voice message of themselves yelling “D’oh!” as well.

Fill in the Blanks

Make someone laugh (or get flirtatious) when you play Fill in the Blanks. To start, text a sentence with a few words left blank. Let the other person fill in those blanks with their reply text, and try to guess what you’re saying. You can treat this like a funny mad-lib or come up with flirty guesses if you’re texting a crush or significant other. For example, the initial text could be, “I use ____ and ____ to pump myself up in the morning!” You could answer the text with something realistic like, “I use a triple-shot latte and my Spotify playlist to pump myself up…” or something funny, like, “I rely on screamo music and pure spite to pump myself up in the morning!”

Fantasy Teams

Create an amazing (and hilarious) team based on a friend’s question. Take turns coming up with a scenario and asking one another who they would want on their ideal team if that scenario came true. You can name real people like celebrities and fictional characters—it’s a fantasy team, after all! A good scenario might be, “Okay: there’s a zombie apocalypse, and you get 5 people on your survival team. Who do you pick?” The sky’s the limit when you answer! You could say, “Superman, Captain Marvel, Daryl Dixon, Lara Croft…and Shrek. I feel like he’s just really tough, you know?”