It is a good idea to set a duration for your LAN party-perhaps a weekend or a couple of days at the most. This would be long enough for it to be exhilarating and short enough to ensure that the rest of your family members/hosts don’t loose hei atience! Of course, if you can manage to your community center or an outside hall, it’s a different matter altogether.

Now that the location and basic infrastructure is dealt with, the next step is to plan what games to play. It’s a good idea to have a mix of games, including a first person shooter, a car racing game and a strategy game. Make sure that these are games that your friends also own and play! Host various game modes-team play, one-on-one, capture the flag, etc. Also, the more game mods you own and run, the greater the variety of gameplay. This definitely adds to the fun!

That’s it for the planning! If you’ve done all of this, you can now move on to publicizing your event. For a small number of participants, your best bet would be to send out a mail, informing them of all the particulars. Besides mentioning the time and place of the LAN party, also mention the rules of the party and the minimum recommended specifications of the computers

to run your games. This will include the processor speed, amount of RAM, graphics card, the presence of a network card, etc. Also state what each participant is required to bring along with them-power strips and spike busters, power cables, etc. It would also be a good idea for them to bring along a set of headphones-carting speakers is a bit cumbersome and is also intrusive if you are hosting your event where others could be disturbed. Finally, tell each one to purchase a IS-foot Ethernet cable.

They would need a standard 3-meter straight-crimped cable, which should not cost more than Rs 100. Get confirmations on participation so that you’ll know what you’re up against in terms of the numbers and infrastructure requirements.