Guide · September 1, 2026 · 4 min read
Mini-games that last more than a week
A games bot is installed in two minutes and uninstalled in three days. What separates the games people relaunch from the ones they try once: the presence of an opponent, a difficulty that does not cheat, and a channel where it bothers nobody.
Contents
Two categories with nothing in common
Two-player games — tic-tac-toe, connect four, rock-paper-scissors — live off the opponent. They create conversation, rematches, rivalries. They are the ones that bring people back.
Solo games — minesweeper, 2048, hangman, guess-the-number — live off the score. They occupy somebody who is waiting, without needing anyone else. Useful, but they create no bond: a server with only those would see its members playing each in their own corner.
The common mistake is installing eight solo games and no two-player game, because the former are simpler to set up. The result feels like an empty arcade.
The solo AI has to win
In a perfect-information game like tic-tac-toe or connect four, a properly written artificial intelligence is unbeatable: at best you get a draw. Many bots choose to make it lose from time to time, so as “not to discourage people”.
That is a bad idea, and players spot it within three games. An AI that loses deliberately turns victory into a gift — it no longer rewards anything. An unbeatable AI, on the other hand, gives a clear goal: get the draw. In tic-tac-toe, managing it every time takes understanding the game, and that is exactly the kind of challenge people tell somebody else about.
The right setting is therefore not to lower the AI's level, but to offer several levels, explicitly announced. Losing to “hard” upsets nobody; losing to an AI that claimed to be easy does.
What to keep, what to cut
- Keep — tic-tac-toe and connect four (against the AI or between members), rock-paper-scissors as a duel, hangman.
- Depends on the server — minesweeper and 2048: heavily played on gaming servers, ignored elsewhere.
- Watch — coin flip and dice roll: harmless on their own, but often used to settle improvised bets.
The dedicated channel is not optional
A game of connect four takes up a dozen messages and scrolls for several minutes. In the general channel it drives out the ongoing conversation, and the third game of the evening irritates everybody.
A games channel settles the problem, provided you restrict the commands to that channel rather than relying on goodwill. It is a setting, not a rule to repeat every day.
The same mechanism lets you switch off one particular game without touching the others: if hangman is mainly used to write inappropriate words, it gets disabled on its own.
Connecting the games to the rest of the server
An isolated mini-game stays a gimmick. Two links make it structural.
The leaderboard. Counting wins per game gives a reason to play again once the novelty has worn off. A monthly leaderboard reset stops the same people from holding first place forever.
The stake. If the server has a currency, letting two members stake on the outcome of a duel completely changes what is at play in a game of rock-paper-scissors. The bot holds the stakes at the start and pays the winner: nobody has to trust anybody, and there is no dispute to arbitrate.
What gets old, and why
Three causes come up. A game that is too slow: if every move means finding the message again and clicking, the game takes ten minutes and nobody starts another. A game with no stakes: no score, no leaderboard, no wager — all that is left is novelty, which lasts three days. And a game with no available opponent: on a thirty-person server, offering a duel at midnight finds a taker one time in ten.
That last point is the real reason to keep at least one good game against the AI: it fills the moments when the server is empty, without claiming to replace the two-player game.
Frequently asked questions
How many games should be installed?
Four or five, not fifteen. A long list dilutes the activity: nobody finds an opponent anywhere. Two heavily played games beat ten tried once.
Can games get in moderation's way?
Mainly through message volume, which drowns the logs. A dedicated channel excluded from the activity statistics settles it.
Should XP be granted for games?
No, or only very little: otherwise the games channel becomes the fastest way to level up, and the leaderboard stops measuring participation in the community.
Can a game be reserved for a role?
Yes. Useful for a game that consumes resources, or to make it a tier reward rather than a function available on arrival.
Read next : Server economy, XP and levels, Day-to-day activity.