How to Set Up a Discord Server for Weekly Game Nights
A structure that survives past the third week
Staff Writer · · 3 min read
A weekly game night needs less server than people think. The failure mode usually isn't a missing channel, it's that week three arrives and nobody has said anything, so nobody shows up.
Here's a structure that holds up, in roughly the order it's worth adding.
Channels
You need four, maybe five.
#game-night for coordination. Who's coming, what are we playing, is it starting yet.
A voice channel named for the event, not "General Voice". A channel called "Game Night" tells someone glancing at the server whether the thing is happening right now.
#bot-commands so that game commands don't bury conversation. Exclude this one from XP if you run a leveling bot, or it will dominate your leaderboard.
#clips for screenshots and highlights. This does more for momentum than it looks like it should, because it's evidence that the event happened and was fun.
A fifth channel, #suggestions, becomes worth it once you're past a dozen regulars.
One role, pingable
Make a Game Night role and let people self-assign it, then ping that role rather than @everyone.
This is the single highest-value thing in this list, because @everyone tends to get muted while an opt-in role gets a response. The people holding it asked to be told.
Use scheduled events
Discord's built-in events are better than a pinned message for one specific reason: they show up in members' event lists and notify them ahead of time, without anyone having to remember to post a reminder.
Set it as a recurring event, since the whole point of a weekly game night is that nobody has to decide to organize it each week.
Post the time as a timestamp
If your group spans more than one timezone, write times using Discord's timestamp syntax so that everyone sees them in their own local time automatically. The full syntax is covered in the timezone article, but the short version is <t:UNIX_TIMESTAMP:F>, and it renders as a correctly localized date and time for every reader.
This removes an entire category of confusion, and it takes about fifteen seconds.
Have something to do when only three people turn up
Some weeks four people show up and some weeks eleven do, so plan for the small week, because that's the one that kills a recurring event.
Games that work with two or three people, and that start instantly, keep a thin night from becoming an awkward one. Chess, Connect 4, a card game, a quick word game. A bot like Gamebot is useful here mainly because it removes the "what can we even play with three people" conversation, which is what usually ends the night before it starts.
Someone has to run it
This isn't a structural point, but it's the real one. Recurring events survive because a specific person considers it their job to post "game night in an hour" every week.
If that person is only you, the event ends the moment you get busy, so give the role to two or three people early on.