Play with a friend
Two player games online that don’t ask you to download anything
2026-09-09 · 6 min read
The worst part of “let’s play something” is the five minutes after you say it. Steam wants an update. An io site autoplays a video. Someone’s phone is on 12% and an app store page is loading like it’s 2014.
What I want is boring, on purpose: two people, a link or a short code, a game that starts. That’s it.
That’s why I keep a tab of two-player games that run in the browser. Get One Spot is the one I send most, because it’s actually built for two people — not eight strangers in a public lobby who leave after round one.
You create a room, you get a six-character code like K7P4MX, you paste it in chat. Friend opens getonespot.lol/invite/K7P4MX. You’re in the same lobby. Pick tic-tac-toe if you’re half-asleep. Pick air hockey if you’re not.
If you’ve been bouncing between TwoPlayerGames.org (mostly same-keyboard Flash leftovers) and papergames (solid for Connect 4 and Gomoku, thinner for anything fast), the gap is realtime stuff that still works on a phone. Drawing, tapping, racing, passing a bomb. The old paper-game sites don’t really do that.
A few that hold up when it’s just the two of you:
Tic-tac-toe and Connect 4 still work because they’re honest. You know the rules. The only question is whether you blunder a three-in-a-row while talking.
Air hockey is the one I use when a text thread has gone quiet. Thirty seconds, no tutorial. You can hear the other person groaning from the other city.
Draw & Guess is the Skribbl.io move without waiting for a six-person lobby. One of you draws, the other types. Then you swap. Best of five. If your friend “can’t draw,” that’s the whole joke.
Quick Draw is mean in a good way. Wait for GO. First tap wins. Don’t tap early or you eat it. I’ve lost to people who swear they didn’t mash.
You don’t need an account. That’s not a slogan, it’s the reason this works at 11pm when nobody wants to reset a password. Play is free. If you want a reserved invite code so your friend always types the same six letters, that’s in the shop. You can ignore it forever.
If you only remember one thing: send the invite link, not a screenshot of the code. People mistype M and N. The link doesn’t.
Open a room on Get One Spot and send the invite. Forty 2 player games, no download.