(Virtual) White Elephant: The classic gift exchange game, but socially distant

Playing this game with friends & family is one of our favorite winter traditions! Since it wasn't going to be possible to play together in person this year, we were going to play virtually via a series of spreadsheets and zoom calls. That's a lot less fun so we hunkered down for the weekend and made a version that didn't need a spreadsheet manager. We tried to make the game as unopinionated as possible since every group plays slightly differently (also we only had two days to make this). The only rules are: if you're stolen from, you get to go again & the game ends when the last wrapped gift is opened. We built this using Align, a video chat platform we've been working on this year. Align makes it easy for any developer to build in-meeting apps and share them with the world via our app store. Align takes care of all the video and real time aspects of the video call and exposes a simple programming interface for developing apps that compose well with each other. Without Align we definitely would not have been able to build this so quickly! We hope this brings you some holiday cheer!