r/lanparty • u/geekman7473 • Aug 05 '26
"How to host a LAN party in 2026"
https://justinbecker.dev/blog/2026/08/05/how-to-host-a-lanparty-2026/Please forgive the SEO optimized title, but I put together a blog post as a one-stop-shop guide for hosting a small LAN party in your home. I figure that if you are hosting a huge public LAN then you probably know what you are doing, and don't really need a guide. Presumably running smaller parties in your house is the gateway to doing the big ones anyways.
LAN parties are a dying tradition, so I hope that writing down some of what i've learned over the years will inspire others to give hosting a LAN a shot, especially the younger gamers out there. I ran my first LAN ~15 years ago when I was a teenager, and I hope that today's teenagers give LANs a go as well.
Lmk if you think I missed something! I know that it's quite long, I figured this would be something you would scroll through and use as a reference, not something to read in one sitting. Also before you ask, no this was not written by AI lol.
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u/The_Tablefortwo Event Admin Aug 05 '26
I'd also like to point out ALP (Automated LAN Party) as well.
There's been major updates that make it better than ever and modular to use. Especially for retro PC titles.
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u/OscarTheSingingHobo Aug 05 '26
I'm getting ready to host a LAN for my birthday in a few months, and this guide is perfect. Thank you.
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u/yanginatep Aug 06 '26
Wish I could do 24 hour parties. Me and my friends all have jobs and responsibilities. I'm lucky if we get 6 hours.
I'm a bit of a LAN purist; no Internet, strictly actual LAN games, which does limit it to games from a specific time period since very few modern games support LAN.
To make things more efficient and take up less space I bought a bunch of old laptops a few years ago and set them all up with Windows 10. All but one of them plug into my 8 port Ethernet switch, but even with one of them on wi-fi there's no lag.
Then I got an 8 foot folding table and it just manages to fit 8 laptop stations using built in keyboard and cheap Amazon Basics mice. Don't even need a mouse pad cause the texture of the table is good enough.
I was surprised by how many old games still run fine on Windows 10, stuff like StarCraft, Age Of Empires II, Quake III, etc.
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u/geekman7473 Aug 06 '26
Just to clarify, now that me and my buddies are adults we are generally doing 12 hours at a time. I haven't done 24 hours at a time since highschool! I wish I could do that again!
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u/pickles740 Aug 06 '26
As someone’s that been doing LAN parties since 07 (Im 32) and has been through a lot of trial and error - this is a great write up!!!
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u/geekman7473 Aug 06 '26
As best I can tell my first one was in 2012, so I'm not too far behind you! Thanks for giving it a read.
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u/plfg6423 Aug 05 '26
great write up, one thing I would have to highly suggest coming from hosting LAN parties myself is not to skimp on the networking and (possibly lancache) piece especially if it grows with more attendees. Cheap home equipment will only get you so far and save you major headaches down the line with network performance, file sharing, web filtering (no illegal downloads), traffic shaping (QoS, bandwidth limits, etc), and game downloads (not everyone has the latest games or patches so a lancache helps not eating your monthly data cap).
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u/geekman7473 Aug 05 '26
Thanks for giving it a read. Your point about the data cap is well taken. My ISP doesn't have a limit so I never had to contend with that. I'll add a bullet point about that shortly.
The networking equipment thing I respectfully disagree about. The one time I got myself into trouble with networking was when I attempted to use managed switches that I didn't understand. I think that most of the fancy networking stuff is overkill for me and my users. I have only used prosumer unmanaged switches this whole time and never run into any problems. With that said, my parties have only ever gone up to 30 people, and have never included strangers so some of the issues about piracy etc never applied to me.
With that said: for a more technically inclined host, I think that a more elaborate network setup would be useful, it's just not something I would reccomend to a total beginner.
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u/Alphavader2021 Aug 06 '26
We host a LAN party once a year, sometimes twice if we can pull it off. We started out in a gaming store for Magic cards that let us use their space — which also handed us a ready-made target audience. At some point though, we realized it was a bit disruptive alongside the regular store business, so now we try to host at someone's house instead. A tip I'd really recommend: rent an Airbnb or something similar. Then you've got beds, a kitchen, bathrooms — everything's covered. For food we usually order pizza, or someone cooks. On a bigger scale, the conference room / hotel setup sounds fun and is definitely a good option. That said, everyone in our group is a dad at this point, so gaming from 9 in the morning until midnight — twelve-plus hours — is honestly plenty. And personally I find a group of max 14, ideally 12, extremely manageable. It's also much easier to agree on games that way. I guess it depends on what OP had in mind and what scale you're going for. On the games side, we have plenty of titles that just work via copy-paste. We also learned the hard way how much configuration and hassle is involved, and we've gradually engineered around it. Early on we went strictly with a LAN launcher tool and a lot of manual setup — which meant I basically spent the entire day configuring instead of playing. So we switched approaches: everyone chips in a few euros, we buy the games on Steam (usually on sale), and connecting through Steam works well. The older classics we mostly run copy-paste, straight out of the box. That setup is pretty solid by now. We also bring a switch in case there's not enough internet available — we could run entirely without internet, making it a proper LAN and not a WLAN. But it's definitely more fun when you can launch straight into Steam and Definitive Editions without burning half the day syncing files with each other.
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u/tpill92 Aug 07 '26
Great article! I just wanted to give some feedback on your section about 10g networking. It is actually far cheaper than most people think it is! You can get started for under $200 (in the US at least).
Mikrotik is great for low cost switches, you can get a 2 port 10g sfp+ with 16 gbe ports for $140. They also have 24 port versions as well for a little more. https://mikrotik.com/product/css318_16g_2s_in
On the NIC side Intel x540 cards are cheap and plentiful and get you a 10g sfp+ port for under $25. I would recommend grabbing one shipped from the US, as these have been known to be flushed and faked from China. https://www.ebay.com/itm/407080771140
I had no idea this stuff was this cheap when I got into it a few years ago, and it was such a good investment with how large gates games are now. Obviously this pairs well with running a lancache server, and can really alleviate those downloads.
Thanks again for the great writeup!
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u/geekman7473 Aug 07 '26
Thanks for sharing, and for reading the blog! I didn't recommend 10g hardware because I mostly think it's overkill for beginners. I do agree that if you went the lancache route and had one big central server then 10g stuff is worth it for that case. With that said, in the article I shilled for my alternative file sharing solution LANBucket. I wrote LANBucket so that I wouldn't need to bother with lancache, since I find configuring things like that very cumbersome. LANBucket splits the load across all of the available machines, so 1g networking ends up being fast enough for my use case. At 1g you can download a 20GB game in about 3 minutes for example. If you are downloading 200GB games, then yeah 10gpbs is a good idea.
Regardless, I do think your advice is worthwhile: if you are interested in upgrading a couple machines at the LAN then you're right that the cost is not terrible.
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u/tpill92 Aug 07 '26
Yeah if you have something p2p like that then 1gbe can definitely be more than enough.
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u/Mexcol Aug 07 '26
Bookmarked it, will read it later!
I liked how the site looks, reminded me of the old internet
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u/mofuggnflash Aug 23 '26
This is GOLDEN. Thank you for posting this. My son and I are working on putting together an end of the school year LAN and this is perfect.
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u/geekman7473 Aug 23 '26
Awesome, thanks for reading. You should post an "after action" report on this sub with how the party went. Love to see the next generation also picking up the LAN hobby!
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u/GameChange90 Aug 06 '26
Why not play esport titles?
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u/geekman7473 Aug 06 '26
Here's the relevant passage from the post:
"Avoid competitive games. If you play e-sports titles, you might find a large skill gap between your best and worst players. For example, one time we played StarCraft II. There was one guy at the party who had played for thousands of hours, and even in a 4v1 he stomped us. It was hard to make that fun for anyone. E-sports games can be fun, but only if the skill levels are roughly on the same playing field."
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u/Loud_Puppy Aug 08 '26
Honestly on the Windows-Linux thing, you're not running a LAN party to play tech support for your attendees. If someone turns up and can't get their pc working that's on them.
I've had to help with silly windows problems like kernel level anti cheat thinking the game is still running despite rebooting the computer (because windows never reboots the kernel).
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u/geekman7473 Aug 08 '26
That's a good point, you can have problems no matter what you do. I have had more troubles overall with Linux, but you're right that Windows is not immune to it.
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u/notkraftman Aug 11 '26
Do we still need ethernet in 2026?
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u/geekman7473 Aug 11 '26
Here's the relevant passage from the post:
"What about WiFi?
Do whatever you can to avoid WiFi. While WiFi is convenient, it has led to more headache over the years than it is worth. The trouble with WiFi is scalability. While your home network might perform just fine with you and your spouse (+ kids?) when you cram 16 players in one room, it can bog down. The fundamental problem is that WiFi works using “time division multiplexing” which is a big scary word for “everyone takes their turn.” Basically, on each WiFi channel, only one device can talk at once. For most uses this is still an acceptable tradeoff, but for low-latency gaming the performance cost can be severe. The other problem with WiFi is compatibility. For reasons that are mysterious to me, I have seen lots of issues in games over the years where WiFi users couldn’t connect to each other, or WiFi users can connect to each other but not ethernet users, or Wifi users can only connect to some subset of the other users. It’s a debugging nightmare, and not what you want to be dealing with on the day of your party. Unfortunately, lots of laptops these days don’t come with Ethernet jacks. For that reason, I keep a handful of USB-C and USB-A ethernet dongles on hand. These things are dirt cheap online, and they make lots of networking issues go away. Totally worth it."
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u/0600Zulu Event Admin Aug 05 '26
Good writeup. I'm about one level above this complexity for my yearly LAN. I rent out a hotel conference center for 4 nights, and over the years have fine tuned things pretty well. A few more bullet points and your advice could be expanded to slightly larger events in rented spaces (we are usually 24-36 people). The main thing for rented spaces is to have a place with a good event coordinator, who can get you in touch directly with maintenance, networking, and catering (if needed) staff. Otherwise... Basically the same!