Games to Play With Friends on FaceTime

Start with Among Us - the call is the game

For a group on FaceTime, Among Us is the pick. It is free on mobile, it crossplays across phones, PC and every console, it takes up to fifteen players, and crucially it is a game that only works if people are talking. That makes the FaceTime call an asset rather than a thing running awkwardly in the background. If you are two people rather than a group, Stardew Valley or Minecraft is the better evening - something slow to potter about in while you talk.

Before the list, though, the mechanics are worth getting right, because FaceTime is the one calling app on this site that cannot hand a game to a friend. That single limitation decides what is realistic.

What FaceTime actually does, and the one thing it does not

Apple's shared-activity feature is called SharePlay, and it does three jobs. It syncs video and music so a group watches together in time. It shares your screen so everyone can see what you are looking at. And, per Apple's own iPhone User Guide, it lets you play supported multiplayer games through Game Center during a call - setting up a Game Center profile, adding friends, downloading a supported multiplayer game, and then tapping Start SharePlay inside the game during the FaceTime call.

The catch is that every player needs their own copy of the game. Apple's flow has each participant find and download the supported multiplayer title for themselves. SharePlay is coordinating a game that everyone already has - it is not streaming yours to them.

This is the opposite of how Steam and Nintendo handle the same problem. Steam Remote Play Togetherstreams the host's game to a guest who does not own it, and Switch 2's GameShare streams a game from one console to nearby systems that do not own it either. FaceTime has no equivalent. Screen sharing will let a friend watch you play anything, but it does not pass them a controller.

So there are really two honest routes, and the second is the one most groups should take.

Route 1 - SharePlay a Game Center multiplayer game

The tidy, Apple-native option. Everyone is on an iPhone or iPad, everyone has a Game Center profile and has added each other as friends, everyone downloads the same supported game, and the host taps Start SharePlay from inside it during the call. The game and the call are then genuinely one activity.

Its limits are the reason it is route one rather than the only route: it needs everyone on Apple hardware, it needs the title to specifically support Game Center multiplayer with SharePlay, and that set of titles is much smaller than "games on the App Store". Checked October 5, 2026.

Route 2 - FaceTime for voices, a crossplay game for playing

Keep the call for what it is good at and run a real multiplayer game beside it. Nobody is restricted to Apple hardware, nobody is restricted to the Game Center list, and the games are better. The call carries the conversation; the game carries the game.

This is how the picks below are chosen. Every one of them is a game your group can be in together while a FaceTime call runs, and every one of them is available on iPhone or crossplays to it, so the person on a phone is not excluded.

Two practical notes. Put the call on a second device if you have one - phone on a stand for FaceTime, game on the iPad, console or PC - because a phone trying to run a video call and a 3D game at once gets hot, drains fast, and drops the quality of both. And use earbuds or a headset: a speaker playing the call next to a microphone picking up game audio produces echo for everyone else. If the group ends up doing this regularly, a wired headset with a decent microphone is the single best ten minutes of shopping you can do, and our headset guide covers what to look for.

If your group is not all on iPhones, Discord does all of this better and streams games too - see our Discord guide. For a plain phone call with no video, the phone page is the one you want.

Picking by group size and phone battery

Two people, talking as much as playing.Stardew Valley or Minecraft. Both are slow enough that the conversation stays the main event, and both are on iPhone as well as everything else. Note that Stardew's multiplayer is same-platform only, so you both need to be on the same kind of device.

Three or four, wanting something to happen. Fortnite or Fall Guys. Both are free, both are on iPhone and every console, and both have rounds short enough that a dropped call does not ruin a session.

Five or more. Among Us, which is the only pick here that scales to a real group and the only one that gets better the more people are talking.

A group that is half iPhone, half Android. Everything on this list except the SharePlay route works fine - but FaceTime itself will not include the Android half of your group in the call. At that point you want Discord or a plain group call, and the game list here still applies.

Battery, heat and the thing that ends sessions early

Almost every failed long-distance phone games night fails for the same boring reason: one phone doing two demanding jobs. A video call is one of the heaviest things a phone does, and a multiplayer game is another. Together they heat the handset, which makes iOS throttle performance, which drops the call quality and the frame rate at the same time.

The fix is to split the jobs across two devices if you possibly can, keep the playing device on a charger, and take the call on the smaller screen rather than the bigger one. If you only have one phone, pick something from the slower end of the list - Stardew Valley and Minecraft ask far less of the hardware than Fortnite or Genshin Impact do.

For groups in very different time zones, the games that survive a session being cut short are the ones to choose - our time zones guide covers which ones those are and why a persistent world beats a match-based game when nobody can commit to an hour.