How to throw a LAN party in 2026 · Justin Becker

Justin Becker

Software Engineer II · Microsoft · Seattle, WA

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Contents

How to throw a LAN party in 2026

2026-08-05

TL;DR

Buy a cheap Gigabit switch and connect all of your players via Ethernet. If possible, your players should be on Windows only. Crank the A/C the day before the event. Play older casual games, and avoid e-sports titles/modern AAA games. Bring lots of snacks, and plan your power needs ahead of time. Use Challonge for tournament brackets. For file sharing, consider using LANBucket.

Intro

I have been throwing LAN parties, or attending them for over 15 years now. During that time, I have built up some tribal knowledge of what it takes to throw a successful LAN party. This guide assumes a couple of things:

Your party is somewhere between 5 and 32 guests. Anything smaller is really just “casually hanging with the fellas” and anything larger gets into serious event planning territory.

You are predominantly looking to play on PC. While I do like to mix in some console games occasionally, if you are looking for a guide on how to host an Xbox 360 LAN for example, you will need to look elsewhere.

You are going to be hosting in a house or apartment, and not a rented event space. I have no experience with that. I have only ever hosted LANs at someone’s house, in a basement, garage, etc.

You are only going to be inviting friends, or friends of friends, and not members of the public. I have never been to a public LAN, and the advice I have might not apply if you are playing with strangers.

As a host your responsibility is to do your best to ensure everyone has a good time. What you don’t want to be doing is running back and forth trying to fix problems on the day of. With a little bit of planning, you can eliminate many of the common pitfalls that home LAN parties face.

AI Disclaimer

LLM tools were used for minor corrections, as well as to generate the visualizations used throughout this post. Otherwise, this is all human written.

Who, When, Where, Why

Why a LAN party?

The art of the LAN party has certainly been in decline for the last 20 years or so. Home internet connections have gotten much faster, so the original purpose of the LAN, low-latency multiplayer, is no longer relevant. Additionally, it is something of an ordeal to lug your PC setup across town, to do something you could have done from your couch. What I will counter with is that absolutely nothing will compare to the energy of playing in the same room, and these days it is no secret that in person connection is harder and harder to come by.

Where

This is hopefully the easy part: anywhere with space for a couple tables and chairs. Though I have been fortunate to live in several houses with large central spaces, I have also been to LANs in cramped basements, and once in my college dorm. Large cavernous event halls, like you may see on social media, are not required to have fun at a LAN. If you don’t have enough space and still want to host, ask around; someone might be willing to let you use their space, as long as you do all the work. Believe it or not, I have done this exact thing more than once!

If these guys are comfortable and having fun, so can you (&copy; Nathan Gamber, 2002)

Who

Personally, I have only been to LANs attended by personal friends and acquaintances. While there are some surviving public LAN parties, I would not recommend inviting strangers into a personal home. I also recommend keeping the invite list strictly to those “gaming.” If you invite people who are going to come just to “hangout” they will take up valuable floor space, and distract your gamers from why you actually invited them. With that said, I still encourage you to get people who are slightly outside of their comfort zone, and not exactly the hardcore gamer stereotype. If you play more casual, lowkey, games you will cast a wider net in terms of who might want to come to your party.

It's ok to invite this guy, but don't only invite this type of guy (South Park &copy; Comedy Central)

When

This one depends a lot on how old you and your guests are. When I was in high school our LANs were almost always 24 hour events. One trick that I recommend to any teenagers wanting to throw a LAN is to wait for a school halfday that lands on a Friday. This way you can start your party early in the afternoon, finish Saturday morning, and everyone will have all day Sunday to recover before school.

Now that I’m in my late 20s, by about hour 10 my back hurts too much to want to keep going. We generally start around noon, and play until 11pm or so. Read the room, and see what your players want to do.

For scheduling, I normally use Partiful. It’s an easy way to get a group together, invite players, and find a date that works for everyone. Most importantly, it allows you to send mass text messages to your group, so you can...