How to LAN-Party in 2024 with everyday laptops

With the lack of local multiplayer in most new game releases the idea of meeting up to play computergames together seems antient. However I am delighted to tell you that having a LAN-Party in [:insert_current_year:] is very fun and having a library of old LAN-Games brings three major benefits with itself:

1. Most old games run well on any relatively recent hardware, resulting in everyone being able to play on a laptop with good performance.
2. Learning and experiencing an old game for the first time in a group is very engaging. As the quirks of the game get discovered by different people the common skill level rises, taking everyone with it.
3. Install files or portable versions of older games can easily be found on the internet, which does not require everyone to have invested a lot of money in a game library. Just make sure to check install files thoroughly to prevent the spreading of Viruses.

The minimum requirements being normal Laptops, no particular gaming Skill, no need for spending money on games result in a low barrier of entry which enables a larger and more diverse group of people to have a good time playing together. It devices the traditional stereotype of LAN-Parties: being only for nerds with expensive computers and enables people from all backgrounds and hobbies to come together and have a good time. The same way that online gaming went from a weird niche to an acceptable free time activity.

The following is a compilation of tools that I like to use when throwing a LAN-Party. This article is meant to inspire more people to have LAN-Events and not to scare anyone away by overwhelming descriptions. I try to keep things simple as the saying goes: An Idiot admires complexity, a Pro admires simplicity.

Requirenments

• LAN – Local Area Network: It is required to have an ethernet-based network for the latency to be kept low. Especially old games are very latency sensitive and in some cases having only a few clients being connected via WIFI can degrade the experience for everyone. Your regular WIFI-Connection might seem fine when playing modern games like Fortnite or Minecraft but you cannot underestimate the RF-Interference when having many people over.
• Desks and Seating: This requirement might be harder than thought. As a host you want every person to have a space with sufficient room for laptop, mousepad on the desk and also legspace below. Improvising and careful planning are the key.
• Internet Connection: This is not as hard of a hard requirement as you might think. Having a slow internet connection does not mean you cannot throw a LAN-Party. Guests can be instructed to update their Game-Libraries and OS before coming. Most LAN-Games will work without an internet connection at all. Further measures, like a Cache Server can be setup as explained later in the post.
• Power: This might also not be a difficult requirement. Laptops consume much less power than fully loaded Gaming Towers with huge displays. When throwing a recent LAN-Party I measured the power draw and 10 Laptops drew around 800W while gaming (including 2 Gaming Laptops). On a single European 230V 16A circuit this is less than a third of the maximum draw (3680W). Of course you should not saturate one circuit fully in case of spikes, etc… Make sure to use quality Powerstrips and don’t be afraid to tap into different circuits from different rooms (to Roommates/Family: This is temporary😉).

Games

Here I have listed games that I have personal experience with. Feel free to write your favorite games in the comments.

Software and Tools

HLSW

This software allows you to see you local gameservers and connect to them via RCON to get Player Statistics, modify server variables, change map, etc…
Useful for statistics like this:

To display the stats on a TV/Projector/Screen I like to have one laptop (old surface tablet) dedicated to the displaying of information. For that I use Sunshine on the tablet and moonlight client on FireTV/GoogleTV. That allows me to show how to install a game and statistics.

ALP – Automated Lan Party

This is a great software solution for hosting multiple gameservers and an internal website for the management of the party. I like to host it on my Proxomx server. If you want to run all game servers at once it requires a ton of resources but if you just start them as needed it will work with a more realistic set. I think 8-12GB RAM are enough for the start.

LANCACHE

This is a great solution for caching Steam, BattleNnet and EpicGames Libraries and also Windows Update. You will need a server with fast and loads of storage. I like to use an old ThinkPad Laptop with a 1TB SSD and 8GB of RAM entirely dedicated to that. For the OS I use Rocky 9. Because of convenience I like to use the Monolithic Docker installation of LANCACHE. For monitoring and prefilling the cache I like to use these tools:

• Steam Prefill: https://github.com/tpill90/steam-lancache-prefill
• BattleNet Prefill: https://github.com/tpill90/battlenet-lancache-prefill
• EpicGames Prefill: https://github.com/tpill90/epic-lancache-prefill
• Monitoring with Elastic Stack: https://github.com/lancachenet/logstash

You can run the prefill tools daily with crontab. The monitoring stack consumes a lot of CPU because of it uses the resource heavy Elastic Stack.

Conclusion

Having a LAN-Party is fun and not difficult at all. Please give me your favorite LAN-Party Games in the comments, I am always on the lookout for old and new games I have not heard of.

HLGF,
Martin

PS: Thank you for the joke “The best kinds of networking events!” @jakob. I am stealing that!