Docs / Home & family
Guests and game night
Game night is the front door for games on the TV. Guests join for one evening with a QR code, and when the evening ends everything they had is revoked.
Game night
Open Game night and press Start a game night. Pick one of the bundled games, answer a short setup quiz and follow the steps it shows for what you picked. Before the game starts, a soundcheck lets every player test their phone or controller.
In party games, phones are the controllers and the TV is the board. Each player scans the QR code on the TV, types a name and gets a controller page. There are three kinds of play:
- Trivia: a question with two to four choices.
- Draw and guess: one player draws a word on their phone and the others guess on theirs.
- Seats: each player takes the next free tile of a split TV, for couch co-op games.
A guest evening: set the conditions first
No QR code exists until you have said what guests may do. Set:
- How long: a number of hours, until a time, or until you end it. At most 12 hours.
- Which tiles of the TV they get, or any free tile as they join.
- Whose headset: their own phone, one of your machines' speakers, or the TV's speakers.
- Input: locked to their tile, or free to move.
- Apps they may open. Only streamed apps are allowed. Each runs in a container of its own and cannot reach your desktop, pages, files or settings.
- Phone as a touchpad on their tile.
- Whether their phone may share its location (for the treasure hunt game) or motion. Both are off by default.
- How many guests, from 1 to 4.
Three presets fill these in for you: Game night, Movie night and Kids.
Guests join
Press Show QR. The code appears on the TV, in a free tile or only on your panel.
- A guest without FrameBuff scans it with their phone's browser, trusts your machine once, types a name and asks. You say yes on your approval bar, and a match code appears on both screens so you know it is them. Their phone then shows their tile, the apps they may open, their own headset and a Leave button.
- A friend with FrameBuff scans or pastes the address on their own machine and joins as themselves. You need to have added each other in People first.
A join over the guest limit is refused before you are asked.
When the evening ends
The evening ends when its time runs out or when you press End evening. Then, for every visitor:
- their input and sound stop, and their tile is cleared;
- a guest's phone access ends, and the old QR code no longer works;
- a friend's extra permissions for the evening end at once;
- what they did is forgotten. FrameBuff writes nothing about a visitor.
You can also revoke one visitor at any time. A friend you revoke stays out for the rest of that evening.