Creative Ways to Bet with Friends: From Board Games to Video Games

Whether as a pre-planned activity or an alternative attempt to do something more interactive with friends, game nights are always a great way to spend time together and have fun, and provide an opportunity to be a creative way to bet with friends. 

Want to make things more exciting? Adding gambling elements to your game nights is a surefire way to increase participation, excitement, and unpredictability for everyone involved. Everyone knows that suggesting a wager is one way to make any activity instantly more interesting. It’s usually just another game or another dare until someone says, “Let’s bet on it.” 

And it’s easy to come up with creative ways to bet with friends.

You may already know how some of these games and bets work; if you don’t, you can learn them quickly. 

Betting with friends doesn’t have to involve taking on a bookmaker or hitting high-stakes casinos together. It doesn’t have to involve real money, either. You can give fun rewards and punishments such as small prizes for winners, having the loser rep their rival team, getting a haircut from the winner, taking extra shots, and so on. As we said, these are easy to come up with. 

So let’s explore some ideas we came up with for creative ways to bet with your friends.

Read More: Creative Long-Term Bets with Friends: From Weight Loss Challenges to Bucket Lists

4 Creative Ways to Bet with Friends

Betting on Board Games

It’s true. Board games are making a comeback. Dusting out the boards, pieces, and dice of your favorite board games has always been a fun way to relax and unwind with friends. Many board games already have an element of luck that helps to even the playing field. You don’t know what numbers you’ll roll on the dice or what letters you’ll pick from the bag. 

If you want to shake things up, you can implement betting into any of these games where players and non-participants can wager on the outcomes. It could be on simple outcomes such as the winner of the game or who plays the best move in a round, and so on. 

Some board games already operate game mechanics that make it easy to implement real money betting. For example, the doubling cube in Backgammon raises your stakes, and in Camel Up, you can replace fake money with real money. In other games, you can get creative with your betting rules.

Using real money for Monopoly could be a fun way to add some cutthroat gambling feel to the game. Each player starts with the standard in-game $1500, which could players cab “buy” with a real money buy-in of $20 per person. 

You roll the dice, play and make deals that will be upheld and recorded per the standard game rules. The game can run for a set time until a winner takes all or until when the first player goes bankrupt. In the end, the total buy-ins are shared based on the portion of in-game cash each player holds. 

Playing Jenga for cash presents another fun avenue for betting with friends. Friends can wager on the game’s outcome, such as a game-winner or an over/under for how many blocks will be pulled out before the wooden structure collapses. 

Non-players are fully drawn into the thick of the game as they watch on, praying for their backed players and odds to deliver, just as in watching a real sport. To add a further exciting twist to a game of Jenga, you can write instructions on each block, such as “add one block,” “add two blocks,” and so on. This adds some degree of luck to the game overall, contributing to more hilarious outcomes and a fun experience.

Betting on Sports

Betting with friends doesn’t necessarily have to be over a board game or at a games night. A typical Saturday of watching sports with friends is instantly more entertaining when someone is asked to back their outrageous predictions with actual money.  

Betting on sports could also be fun for non-sports fans who want to join the action. There are countless things to bet on in a sports game. Taking a cue from some hilarious NFL prop bets, you can have bets placed on what celebrities would be shown on the big screen, how many times a commentator mentions a particular player’s name in the next minute, and so on. The possibilities are endless. 

Betting on sports is probably the most common type of betting amongst friends. One creative way to make it much more interesting is by keeping track of the bets made over time. 

WagerLab is one of the best apps for betting with friends and the perfect platform to record how each bet turned out. If, for some reason, your friend can’t quite remember their bold underdog pick for a match at any point in the season, WagerLab can serve as a reminder. Private pools and leagues on the app also highlight who is most consistently accurate with their picks. 

Using WagerLab also eliminates the need for you and your friends to be in the same place before wagering on a game. The app is available on Android and iOS and comes with a chat feature where you can banter and defend your picks.

Betting on Video Games 

Video game betting has steadily increased within the gambling industry in the last few years. This has helped gamers develop interesting ways to bet on an area that has always been super competitive amongst friends. 

You can back your skills or those of others in esports games and place bets on outcomes like which player wins a round, who draws first blood, who gets the most kills, and so on. You can also wager on the expected outcomes of popular sports games such as FIFA 23 and NBA 2K.

Fantasy Leagues 

Fantasy sports leagues are a great way to place creative bets with friends for non-sports and sports fans. Many fantasy sports apps allow you to create private leagues your friends can join and invite others. 

Offering financial incentives encourages players to take their teams more seriously, adding to the league’s competitiveness. Head-to-head leagues create another dynamic to how the season plays out. In the short term, you can place side bets on who scores the highest or least points in a single game week, who has the most points on their bench, and many more creative and hilarious outcomes.

Conclusion 

You can instantly make any activity more exciting by introducing betting elements. There are countless creative ways to bet with friends, from board games to betting on sports and video games. We’ve shared some of our ideas on the matter, but it only gives you a place to start when you’re looking for something to bet on. 

Betting with your friends can be fun, but ensure you don’t get too carried away, especially if you’re betting for real money. It would be wise to limit betting units to small sizes so no one loses too much money, possibly causing the games to get too serious. Losing large bets to friends might hurt more than losing to the bookies.

Using a sports betting app for friendly bets, such as WagerLab, not only helps you track your bets and organize prize pools for a set duration, but it also gives you the option of betting with points instead of using real money. In any case, always remember to gamble responsibly.