Twitch chat games that get your viewers talking

Put your viewer count beside your chat and you'll see the gap: plenty of people watching, a handful talking. Most viewers are lurkers, people who watch without typing, and that's normal. They're there, they just haven't been given a reason to speak.

Asking chat a question works once. Asking every ten minutes starts to sound like a request. What a lurker needs is something fun to type, that takes a second and answers straight back.

A chat game is a command anyone can type, like !fish or !duel, that your chat bot answers on the spot. A viewer who has typed one has spoken in your chat, and the next message is a small step rather than a first one.

Games also give your regulars something to come back for. Played for points that stay with each viewer from one stream to the next, a running total and a top of the table become part of your channel, the way an inside joke does.

Twitch has two games of its own. A poll asks chat to pick between 2 and 5 choices, and viewers can spend Channel Points for extra votes. A prediction lets viewers back an outcome with their Channel Points and win from the pool if they guessed right.

Both are worth using, with limits. You or a moderator start each one, only one prediction can run at a time, and predictions are only open to affiliates and partners.

Chat games fill the gap between them: they run on their own whenever a viewer types the command, as often as chat likes, on any channel.

The quickest are the games a viewer plays alone: roulette (pull the trigger and hope the chamber is empty), fishing (cast a line and see what bites) and love or hate (how much one viewer loves another, as a percentage). One command, one answer, nothing to wait for.

Then the game between two viewers. In a duel, one viewer challenges another, who has a short time to accept before the bot picks a winner. It's the game that gets two regulars talking to each other rather than to you.

Races reward whoever is fastest: a getaway (the first to shoot catches the runner), a bomb (cut the right wire), a drop (the first to grab it keeps it) and a word scramble (the first to unscramble the word wins). They pull lurkers in, because anyone can win and winning only takes typing first.

And one that needs no points at all: a chat vote. A question sits on your stream, viewers answer by typing in chat, and the bars fill as they do. Each viewer counts once, their latest answer standing, so spamming an answer doesn't move the bar, and nobody spends Channel Points to take part.

And the raffle, for the moments you choose: you open it, viewers enter with a command, and the bot draws one of them at the end. The chat below plays three of them, the way they'd play in yours.

Games feel better with something on the line, so most are played for points. Keep them your channel's own points, earned by chatting and won in games, with no money attached: nobody can buy them or cash them out, so losing them is part of the game rather than a real loss.

A timeout is the classic penalty for losing at roulette or cutting the wrong wire. On Twitch, a timeout keeps a viewer out of chat for a set time, from one second up to two weeks. For a game, keep it to a minute or so: long enough to be funny, short enough that nobody leaves.

Then protect your chat from the games themselves. A wait per viewer stops one viewer fishing ten times a minute, or two friends taking turns to start and win a getaway, one round of each game at a time stops a pile-up, and keeping the raffle and the word scramble to you and your moderators saves them for the moments you pick.

You can run games yourself: post a scrambled word, watch chat for the answer, keep the scores in a spreadsheet. It works for one evening, but you're refereeing instead of playing.

The usual alternative is a separate bot just for games, with its own account to authorise, its own dashboard and its own points, beside the bot that already handles your commands and moderation. Two bots in one chat means two sets of settings to keep in step, and viewers learning two of everything.

Open Chat bot, then the bot you want, then its Games tab. Switch bot points on first: viewers earn them by chatting, and they're separate from Twitch Channel Points. Every bot you keep pays into the same points.

Then switch on the games you want. Each has its own commands, which you can rename, and its own rules: who can start it, how long viewers have to answer, what a win pays and whether losing times the viewer out. For the word scramble, add the words the bot picks from.

Try them in the test chat before your viewers do: send a command as one viewer, accept a duel as another, let a getaway run out of time. Nothing reaches Twitch. The chat below is the same test chat, on a sample bot with every game on and everyone starting with points.

Save, and the games play wherever that bot is in your chat, answered by MagicMateBot with Twitch's Chat Bot badge. The Points tab on the Chat bot page shows who's ahead, and viewers can ask in chat: !points gives their balance and their place, !top the leaders. Games are on every plan, the free one included, and they don't use AI credits. A chat vote is an overlay rather than a bot game: build a Chat vote in Overlays & panels and add it to your scene like any other.