Thursday Night
Hosting a night
About five minutes the first time. After that it's one double-click.
You run the room. Your PC is the cinema — it holds the film, the sound and everyone's voices, and your friends dial into it from a headset or from a browser. There is no server in the middle and no account to make, which is why this page is short.
Once, ever
Before your first night
- Unzip the folder anywhere you like — your desktop is fine. There's no installer and nothing goes into Program Files. Keep the folder together; the game expects its neighbours.
- Double-click
_REGISTER_LINKS.batonce. It teaches Windows that “open the theater on this PC” buttons on the website should open your copy of the game. It takes a second, asks for nothing, and needs no administrator. Run it again if you ever move the folder, or those buttons will point at where the game used to be. - Leave your router alone for now. The game asks your router for the one port it needs, every time it starts. It works on most home routers without you touching anything — and when it doesn't, the game tells you so on screen, in step 3, before anyone has tried to join.
Optional, during the week
Setting up a night in advance
Go to thursday-night.com/schedule, pick a date, and add the people you want. It sends the invitations and the reminders, collects who's coming, and lets everyone vote on what to watch.
You can skip all of it. Scheduling is for planning ahead — nothing about starting a night depends on it. If it's already Thursday and everyone's in the group chat, go straight to the next step.
Thursday
Starting the night
Double-click _START_NIGHT.bat. That's the whole
thing. It works out whether your headset is up, refuses to trample a night
that's already running, checks the port it needs is free before it
launches anything, and then waits until the room has genuinely opened before it
tells you it worked.
Once you're in, open the menu — Tab on the desktop, X or a click of the left stick in VR — and go to the Stream tab. The first two cards are the only ones that matter tonight:
- Invite friends — your room code, big and gold, in the
shape
XXX-XXXX. This is what you read out. - Can friends get in? — five lines that answer that question honestly: whether you're hosting at all, the router, Windows Firewall, your public address, and whether your ISP has put you behind another layer of network. Fix a red line and it turns green by itself — the card re-checks constantly. Green all the way down means the code you're about to read out will actually work.
If there's an amber “SAME WIFI ONLY” line under your code, wait a few seconds and read it again. Until your public address comes back, the code encodes your local one — it still works perfectly for anyone in the house, and can never work for anyone outside it. Handing that version to a friend on their phone across town produces a failure that looks like something else entirely.
Your room code is your home address in disguise. It isn't a password — it's your internet address, packed into seven characters. That's precisely what lets a friend reach you with no account, no login and no server in the middle, and it's a trade worth making. It also means the code is worth the same care as your address: read it out to the people you're inviting; don't post it anywhere public. A new night gives you a new code whenever your address changes.
Thursday
What your friends do
| They have | They do |
|---|---|
| A headset | Open Thursday Night and type your code on the join screen. They're in the room with you, at a seat, with their voice coming from where they're sitting. |
| Just a phone or a laptop | Go to thursday-night.com and type the same code. No install, no account. They watch the same screen, hear everyone, and appear in the room as a silhouette in a seat so nobody's forgotten. |
It's one code for both — you don't have to know which kind of friend you're talking to before you read it out.
Thursday
Picking what to watch
Two ways, and they're good at different things.
Play a film from your PC
Put the file in the Movies folder next to the game, then open
the menu → Room tab → The show →
Choose film…. Everyone — including your friends — can read what
you picked off that same card, so nobody has to ask.
Use .mp4 if you have the choice. This is the
steadier of the two: the picture stays sharp, the sound stays with it, and the
scrub bar works.
Share your screen
Menu → Stream tab → Start sharing my desktop. Your main monitor and its sound go up on the venue screen, so anything you can play on your PC, you can watch together — which is the point of it.
If the thing you're sharing is fullscreen, switch it to borderless windowed, or the capture sees nothing and everyone gets a black screen.
When it goes wrong
Something isn't working
When something goes wrong on a Thursday Night is the page for that — every entry on it is a failure that actually happened here, written the way you'd say it out loud, because when it's 8:05 and four people are waiting that's all you have.
The two worth knowing before you need them:
- Everyone is stuck connecting. Almost always the router forgot the port forward between sessions. Quit and start the night again — it re-claims the port every launch.
- One friend can't get in and everyone else is fine. Not the router: the router is either broken for everybody or nobody. In VR, it's usually that their controllers were asleep when the app launched.
If you're still stuck, email support@thursday-night.com and say what you were doing, how many people were connected, whether they were in VR or a browser, and the version from the pill in the menu — yours and theirs.