We will be hosting the 9th(!) instalment of our annual LAN Party, the TesLAN! Organised by Thor, the Electrical Engineering Student Association of Eindhoven University of Technology.

Open to everyone with cool prizes you can win in many competitions! But you are free to play relaxing (board)games as well!

The timelapse of last edition can be seen here.

TesLAN 8

Be sure to check it out at: teslan.party

I am 16 and decided to plan my first LAN party. For the party I will have a 24 port 10/100mbit switch, and a 5 port gig switch.

I have access to about a room and a half of the house and ability to run an extension cord from somewhere else.

3 of our people are laptops, everybody else is a desktop.

My main concerns are sleep and the amount of food all my friends are going to eat, last time I had people over it was 4 people for 4 hours and we drank 6 liters of soda and ate 5 bags of chips. Scaling up and the fact I'm planning the day after school gets out people can showup whenever after 9am, and hopefully I can run until the day after at 7pm, as some of the people going will want to be home Sunday morning due to their religious parents, church obligations.

I have a NAS and it seems it can store stuff fine.

I also want ideas for games, my friends haven't been helpful at suggesting games everybody can run or missing the "LAN" part of "LAN PARTY"

So far I have Minecraft, and Mindustry, but I haven't come up with much else.

So to summarize: I would appreciate sleep suggestions (We have a room and a half of space, large room), food & drink ideas, and game suggestions.

Edit: The lowest end hardware we are planning for is an asus g74sx with 16gb ram, 900p screen on debian. Games also have to be Proton/Wine compatible.

So lately, we've been collecting as many games as we want that has LAN co-op for campaign games and also in quick matches against bots just for fun, including some obscured games that still holds up well so are there any more games we've missed?

Here are the games we've played so far:

Battle Realms, Battlefield 2, Battlestations Pacific (my personal favorite obscured game), Blur, COD World at War, COH1, Red Alert 2 (has co-op exclusive multiplayer), Counter-Strike 1.6 and Source, F1 2014, GTA IV, GTAV (through co-op mod) L4D2, NFS ProStreet (the only NFS with multiplayer against bots), Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising and Red River (really a good campaign coop), Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and 2, Resident Evil 5, Rocket League (pre-F2P version), Saints Row 3 and 4, TF2, and Frozen Throne (pre-Reforged)

So i've been hosting a LAN last year for the first time and eded up juggling Doodle, WhatsApp, handwritten notes (i know...) and it didn't really work out for us. We had to organize on site again - where does everyone sit, what are we going to eat, what games are we playing and so on. Still it ended up being very fun but for this year I wanted to solve this planning issue. I built this on my private server but my friends gave me good feedback so i thought - maybe this is useful for others out there too.

What it does:

• Interactive seating plan — drag & drop floorplan, guests pick their own seats
• Game voting — everyone suggests and votes on what to play
• Meal planning — breakfast/lunch/dinner sign-ups so you know how much pizza to order
• Hardware checklist — who's bringing the switch, extra monitors, extension cords
• Supply list — drinks, snacks, savory stuff — claim what you're bringing
• Countdown + activity feed — hype your guests with a live countdown and event updates

How guests join: You share a link, they click it — no account needed, no signup. Host logs in via Discord.

It's completely free, no premium tier, no ads. I'm a solo dev building this in my spare time. If you want to support it there's a buy-me-a-coffee link, but zero pressure.

Currently DE/EN, works on mobile and desktop. (although for creating a floorplan you might want to use the desktop view :D)

Although the main features are done and working the whole thing is still work in progress. Some features i want to add include but are not limited to:
- Discord Bot integration
- open a moneypool of some sorts (no details planned yet for this though)
- "Quick-LAN"-Creation with prefilled Game/Hardware-Lists...

yeah so check it out if you are planning a LAN in the near future - happy to answer any questions or take feature requests :)

https://preview.redd.it/t9fvjiyqs9yg1.png?width=2400&format=png&auto=webp&s=1a415c814f2b8a158f1f947f538ef60b1409cd42

I'm looking for beta-testers of my - soon to be released - software RetroLAN. Please reach out if you want to try it out and help me tweak it before release date (soon!)
check it out here, and also support by signing up to the waitlist: retrolan.store

All participants will get 2 x free licenses on release date as a small thank you.

What is RetroLAN?

The idea is simple: plug a USB stick into an old laptop or spare PC, boot from it, and jump straight into an arcade-style launcher without touching the installed OS. Other RetroLAN sticks on the same Wi-Fi or Ethernet network can find each other, so you can host/join games locally without accounts, cloud services, or setup chaos.

Key features:

• Boots directly from USB
• Arcade-style launcher, not a normal desktop OS
• Local lobby for finding other RetroLAN players
• Wi-Fi and Ethernet setup built in
• Bring-your-own legally owned game files
• Companion app for preparing games from Mac/Windows
• Trial mode first, unlock license later
• Designed for old laptops, LAN parties, garages, classrooms, and nostalgia nights
• Commercial games are not bundled. The goal is to make it easy to prepare and launch games you already own, plus include free/open demo games for testing hardware. (I'm sure you your own resources or copies)

It’s coming soon, and I’m looking for feedback from people who miss old-school LAN nights.

Visit retrolan.store for more info.

Went thru some old videos photos and found this gold piece , had potato phone but still recorded. This video gets in my feelings every time .

And on every first night of the lan 500+ people would raid Statoil a gas station , fun times.