PULTEVENT
Party games on TV with phones: 8 formats a whole room plays at once
Saturday, a rented flat, eleven people and one sofa that seats four. The TV above the fireplace shows a QR code the size of a pizza box. My friend's aunt pushes her reading glasses up, points her phone at it, types her name, and a second later her phone tells her she's in. Nobody went to an app store. Nobody typed a password. The only sound is the laptop fan and someone in the kitchen asking what the wifi password is, which, as it turns out, they don't need.
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That is the whole idea of PULTEVENT, and I built it for exactly these rooms. The host runs the evening from a browser on a laptop. The TV or projector is the stage. Guests join from the phones already in their pockets by scanning the code, and from then on the phone is their buzzer, their answer pad or their steering wheel.
One honest caveat before anything else: phones need internet for the phone games. Mobile data is fine, venue wifi is fine, a hotspot works. What you can't do is play these games in a cellar with no signal, and I would rather you knew that now than at nine in the evening.
8 party games that run on the TV while guests play from their phones
1 The QR roll call
The first thing on the TV is the code. Guests scan it once, type a name, and that one connection carries them through the whole night: when you start a vote or a quiz, the right screen opens on their phone by itself. It sounds like admin. In practice it gets the first laugh, because somebody always signs in as "Batman".
How to run it. Put the code up while people are still taking coats off. Say once: camera, code, type your name. Then leave them to it.
By the time you start the first real game, everyone is already connected and nobody is fiddling with their phone mid-round.
2 Phone quiz, four options
A question on the TV, four answers on every phone. The correct answer is shuffled between A, B, C and D each time, so nobody can copy the loud guy by position.
How to run it. Build your own questions in the quiz builder, in any language, or load them from the Excel template.
The quiet cousin who never shouts an answer gets to win something, which is half the reason to run a quiz at all.
3 Room vote
You type a question and two to six options. Bars grow on the TV as people vote. You close the vote, the winner lights up.
How to run it. Best dressed, best toast, which song goes on next. Keep the options short enough to read from the back of the room.
It settles arguments in fifteen seconds and makes the guest of honour feel like a head of state.
4 Guess the Guest
Before the party you collect one odd fact from each guest. On the night the TV shows the fact and the room guesses whose it is.
How to run it. Ask for the facts a week ahead in a group chat. Things like "I once got locked in a museum" beat "I like travelling".
Strangers stop being strangers. Two people discover they both worked the same summer job and don't stop talking.
5 Drift Arena
A 3D car park on the TV, up to twelve cars, each one steered from a guest's phone. Gas is automatic, the two halves of the phone screen steer, a big button throws the car into a slide.
How to run it. Tell the room one rule: you only steer and drift, the car goes by itself. Hitting a wall costs you your drift points.
It is the moment the party stands up. People who were chatting on the balcony come back in to see why everyone is yelling.
6 Horse Race
Six horses on a 3D track, six guests with a Gallop button on their phones. The phone tells you when to jump a hurdle, and there are coins to grab on the way.
How to run it. Let the people who are not riding pick a horse to cheer for. It doubles the noise for free.
Short, loud, easy to explain. Grandparents win this one more often than you would think.
7 Team scoreboard
A small panel on the TV keeps the score of every team through the whole evening, whatever game you are playing.
How to run it. Split the room by sofa, by table or by family branch. Name the teams something they will enjoy shouting.
A running score turns a string of games into one story, and the last round actually matters.
8 Awards on the TV
The scoreboard ends in a ceremony: fun awards first, then third, second, and the winner with fanfare and confetti on screen.
How to run it. Read the awards out loud yourself instead of letting the TV do it. Pause before the winner. Always.
Every team gets something, so nobody goes home a loser, and the party has a proper ending instead of just running out of steam.
One code, the whole room
Guests scan the QR on the TV and land in the game in their phone browser. No download, no account, no email address.
The laptop stays with you
You pick the next game, open voting, add points and skip what isn't working. The TV shows only what you send to it.
Games for sitting and for standing
Quizzes and votes for the dinner table, 3D races for when people are ready to shout at a screen.
One score for the night
Every round can feed the same team scoreboard, and the evening ends with an awards ceremony on the TV.
What you actually need at home
A laptop with a browser, a TV or projector, and a cable between them. HDMI is the usual one. The console runs in one window and the stage in another, and you drag the stage window onto the TV.
Then the guests' phones. Any reasonably recent phone will do, iPhone or Android, because the game opens in the browser. They need internet, and each guest can use their own mobile data, so you don't have to hand out the router password to twelve people.
That's the whole kit. No consoles, no controllers to charge, no fight over who gets player two.
Why phones beat controllers at a party
A games console at a party has a queue problem. Four controllers, twenty people, and the same four people holding them all night. With phones, everyone in the room is already holding a controller. The quiz takes the whole room at once, the vote takes the whole room at once, and the racing games take twelve at a time and rotate quickly.
The other thing phones fix is shyness. Plenty of guests will never stand up and shout an answer. Tapping one on a phone is fine. I have watched the quietest person at a table win a quiz and then get quietly, deeply competitive about the next round.
How I pace a living-room evening
Start sitting down. The QR roll call, then a short quiz or Guess the Guest while people are eating. Nobody wants to race a horse holding a plate.
Once the food is gone, stand them up with Drift Arena or the Horse Race. Keep each game short, ten or fifteen minutes, and move on while people still want more. A game that runs until it's boring is remembered as boring.
Finish with a vote and the awards. The last ten minutes are what people talk about in the taxi.
The internet question, answered plainly
The phone games talk to a server, so every phone needs a connection. In most homes mobile data is enough. If you are in a basement, a country house or an old building with thick walls, test it before the party: stand where the guests will sit and open a web page.
If the signal is weak, turn your own phone into a hotspot or give guests the wifi. What PULTEVENT won't do is run the phone games offline, and I would not trust anything that promised otherwise.
Same games on a video call
Half the family is in another city? Share the stage window in any video call. The people at home see the TV picture on their screens, scan the code from it, and play from their phones along with the people on the sofa.
It works better than you'd expect. The one thing to watch is the delay on the call: in a quiz, give remote players a couple of extra seconds before you close the round.
About the author
PULTEVENT was built by Ruslan Barashkin, a host who has run weddings, company parties and birthdays since 2014: more than 500 events, and TOP 100 Awards best host in Moscow (2024) and Saint Petersburg (2023). He built the console for his own events first.
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How to run party games on the TV with phones
- 1
Open the console in a laptop browser and connect the laptop to the TV with an HDMI cable.
- 2
Drag the stage window onto the TV and add the guests' names if you have them.
- 3
Put the QR code on the TV and let people join while they are arriving.
- 4
Start with a seated game: a phone quiz, Guess the Guest or a vote.
- 5
When the food is done, switch to Drift Arena or the Horse Race and rotate players.
- 6
Close the night with the team scoreboard and the awards ceremony on the TV.
FAQ
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See also
Run brighter events — with PULTEVENT
All audience interactions, a second screen and timing in one app. Guests join by QR — internet is needed for you and for them.
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