My family met up on Houseparty at the weekend. As with other video meeting apps, players can wave and make faces at each other on screen – think Zoom without all the businessy stuff. It caters for up to eight people and offers four games to play (Heads Up, Trivia, Chips and Guac, and Quick Draw.)

I have a Windows laptop, so downloaded the Chrome app (options are iOS, Android, MacOS or Chrome) Every time I go to the app, I get the message…

An error occurred accessing camera/microphone. Check other apps are not using those devices and try again.

But when I click OK it works fine.

Except I see no dice.

You have to click on dice in the top right-hand corner of the screen to get the list of available games and I don’t have any on my screen. This meant I couldn’t see the game when the others were playing it.

The other participants saw a message telling them that Cathy Cade needed to update the Houseparty app, but this didn’t show for me, and there was nowhere to click to update. I tried re-downloading (from a different Houseparty screen) which made no difference at all.

It wasn’t only me that had this issue: my daughter had the same problem on her Mac laptop.

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(see dice in right-hand corner here >>>>>)

We were both able to get the games up on our mobiles ,

but I’m not keen on such a small space for my clumsy fingers (fingernails get in the way when drawing on screen).

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Since I have a Surface Pro, I tried it again in tablet mode but still no dice.

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I have Googled the problem but found no help there, nor any link to the issue on Houseparty’s support website. I sent a query via their “Contact Us” link; I’ll let you know (on this page) when/if it gets solved.

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Elizabeth Slaughter, who blogs at Saved by Words has put me on to Kahoot, which offers a range of educational online games.

You’ll need a video-conferencing app (…Google Hangouts Meet or Skype etc) to play them,

but it’s free to sign up and they offer plenty of help and advice with choosing suitable games.

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What new resources have you discovered in lockdown?

Keep safe, everyone, and hang on in there.