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The hard part of a long-distance call is not finding time. It is that after the news is exchanged, you are both looking at each other with nothing scheduled, and "so what did you do today" has already been used.

These eight work over a video call. All of them need one person to read a screen and nothing else.

What breaks over a call, and what does not

Anything timed breaks. A one-minute round becomes forty seconds for one of you and eighty for the other. Avoid Charades, Heads Up and anything with a countdown.

Anything visual mostly breaks. Drawing games depend on both of you seeing the same thing clearly, and compression ruins it.

Anything conversational works better than it does in person. With no room, no distractions and no phone to glance at, question games get noticeably more honest over a call.

The eight

21 Questions. The strongest on the list. It was already a conversation game; the call format removes everything that competes with it.

Would You Rather. Second-best. Both answer, then argue. The argument is the game, and arguing works fine over video.

Never Have I Ever. Ten fingers each, held up to the camera. Slightly comic over a call, which helps.

Who Knows Me Better. Genuinely better long-distance than in person, because the whole game is testing whether the gap has cost you anything. One of you answers silently, the other guesses.

Truth or Dare, truths only. The dares mostly do not translate. The truths do.

Two-person quiz. Take turns asking each other things only you would know.

Watch something on a shared timer, then play Would You Rather about it. Low effort, works when you are both tired.

Plan something. Not a game exactly, but the single best use of a long call is deciding a real date for the next time you are in the same place.

Making the call itself better

Put a rough end time on it. Open-ended calls end when one of you is falling asleep, which is a bad note to finish on. A call with a finish line ends while it is still good.

Do things in parallel sometimes. Cooking on a call, both of you, is closer to actually spending an evening together than staring at each other.

Do not save every serious conversation for the call. If the only time you talk properly is the scheduled one, every call has to carry too much.

Play them in the browser

Each of these runs free with no download, so one of you shares a screen or just reads it out:

• 21 Questions — the best one for a call
• Would You Rather — for when you want to argue
• Who Knows Me Better — for finding out what the distance has cost
• Never Have I Ever — the fastest to start