In March 2023, Discord’s developers announced the launch of Activities, which was advertised as a promising new addition to Discord that would allow users to connect and interact with each other on the platform in ways that weren’t possible before. With Activities, users can now have fun with their friends directly on Discord rather than having to play games on other platforms.
There is only one problem with Activities — despite Discord constantly beckoning users to do so, very few actually use the feature. Opening the Activities tab on the app today, it’s easy to see why; right off the bat, you’re greeted with a hodgepodge of seemingly low-quality games (like Solitaire Home Story or poxel.io) that look downright unenjoyable to play.
However, the apparent slop running rampant throughout the Activities tab only heightened my curiosity. I wanted to know: were these games really as bad as they looked, or were there some hidden gems waiting to be discovered? To find out, I took it upon myself to play five of Discord’s most popular, odd and intriguing games.
Farm Merge Valley
It’s easy to tell what Farm Merge Valley is about from its title. It’s a typical “merge game” where you combine animals and crops to create bigger ones. Once all resources are fully merged, you can collect items to expand your farm until you run out of energy.
Farm Merge Valley is not a good game. Its simplicity makes it very boring, it completely lacks any sort of challenge and it does absolutely nothing to distinguish itself from other merge games. It’s also filled to the brim with in-app purchases, making it clear that Farm Merge Valley is nothing but another cash grab merge game in a sea of cash grab merge games. There is absolutely no reason to play it.
If for some reason you do find yourself playing Farm Merge Valley, however, you might find that there’s something oddly addicting about it. The game is horrible, and yet every time the game notifies me that my energy has been refilled, I feel compelled to open it and spend 30 minutes merging animals until I run out again. The dopamine rush of merging my cows or chickens or carrots pulls me in, in a way very few games have — and I hate it. Play Farm Merge Valley at your own risk.
Bobble League
Bobble League is a game where players, or “bobbles” as the game calls them, face off in two teams of up to four players to hit a ball into each other’s goals; the game ends when a team gets three points. Although it seems like a simple concept, the game is spiced up by power-ups that bobbles can collect and use to instantly change the outcome. From players using ramps to fly over the field to bumpers that unpredictably bounce bobbles around the field, Bobble League is far more entertaining than it sounds.
Bobble League shines when you play with friends. With teammates working together to use their bobbles and power-ups strategically against the other team, the game brings out the most competitive sides of everyone. Combined with the erratic physics of the bobbles, all of this makes for genuinely interesting gameplay and hilarious moments that will create long-lasting memories for you and your friends to cherish.
Although Bobble League supports both single-player and multiplayer gameplay, I wouldn’t recommend playing it on your own. If you do, you’ll end up playing against a computer whose moves are extremely easy to predict. This creates a lack of any real strategizing against the opposing team, completely sucking all of the fun out of the game. If you want to play Bobble League, make sure you have some friends first.
Smash Karts
In Smash Karts, players drive around in karts, using power-ups scattered around the map to try and kill each other. The person who has the most kills at the end of the round wins.
If you haven’t picked up on it already, Smash Karts is basically a ripoff of Mario Kart’s Battle Mode. That’s not to say it’s bad — if you and your friends are looking for some solid entertainment, Smash Karts certainly does the trick, at least for a little while. However, the game becomes repetitive quickly. The map changes after every round, bringing in a bit more variety, but they all have similar layouts, making the difference more cosmetic than anything else.
In addition, the power-ups in Smash Karts can be unfair. Some power-ups are stronger than others, without being compensated for by lowered odds of receiving them. This makes the game more luck-based than anything. If you get good power-ups, you win, and if you get bad power-ups, you get dominated by everyone else, with no real way to catch up. Overall, though, if you’re just looking for a fun time with your friends, Smash Karts is serviceable.
Putt Party
Putt Party is a game about golf. You and your friends vote on a map and compete to see who can complete the map (which consists of six holes) in the fewest strokes. Much like the others, it’s a very simple game, but it shakes things up with the use of power-ups like tornadoes and wind that can throw the ball off course.
However, the true fun of Putt Party comes not from the power-ups, but from the different maps. Not only does each map have its own unique look, but they also have their own gimmicks that keep the gameplay fresh and exciting every single time. For example, the Fortune Falls map adds or subtracts from your score based on where your ball lands on each hole, and the Jumpington map makes heavy use of bumpers that bounce your ball around.
All of the game’s variety makes it so that no two rounds are the same. Putt Party is guaranteed to be a smash hit among you and your friends, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Snake Squad
In Snake Squad, you are a snake. As a snake, you kill and eat other snakes around you until you become the biggest snake in the map, all while trying not to be killed by the other snakes along the way.
Snake Squad is a copy of slither.io (already a copy of the many other .io games that came out in 2016), but worse in every conceivable way. Not only is it unoriginal, but the game itself barely works — it’s not uncommon to randomly die when there are no other snakes around you, or for you to try to kill a snake, only to instead be killed by the game yourself. With the amount of bugs it has, Snake Squad could pass as a game entirely coded by ChatGPT.
It’s really hard to say much else about it. Snake Squad is a lazy, buggy, copied mess that you should absolutely stay away from at all costs. Just play slither.io instead.
Although there’s certainly room for improvement, Discord Activities is a perfectly fine feature. I expected to completely dread playing every game I laid my eyes on, but, especially with friends, many of the games are not as awful as they look. Activities hasn’t revolutionized the platform or the way people communicate on it in the way Discord hoped it might, and it’s still riddled with fundamental flaws (if basically all of the games are derivative of other popular games, why not play the originals instead?), but the potential is clear. Perhaps with some tweaks, some more originality and a greater focus on self-advertising, Activities can leave behind its current state of irrelevancy and transform Discord like it once promised to do.
Daily Arts Contributor Caiden O’Donnell can be reached at caidenod@umich.edu.
