Setup guide · 4 min read
Playing with 5, 6 or 7 people on one keyboard? Here is why some key presses are ignored, how to test your keyboard and what to do about it.
You gather six friends around one laptop, everyone picks a colour and then, halfway through the first round, one player’s key simply does nothing. It is not a bug in the game. It is almost always a hardware limit called keyboard ghosting.
What is keyboard ghosting?
Most keyboards do not wire every key separately. Keys are arranged in a grid, and the keyboard works out which keys are pressed by scanning that grid. When several keys are held at the same time, some combinations look identical to the keyboard’s circuitry. To avoid reporting keys that were never pressed, the keyboard ignores some of the real presses. That is ghosting, and it shows up most on laptop keyboards and inexpensive desktop ones.
A related limit is rollover: the number of keys a keyboard can report at once. Many basic keyboards are fine with two or three keys and start to drop presses after that. Gaming keyboards often advertise “N-key rollover”, which means every key can be pressed at the same time.
How to test your keyboard in one minute
- Open the game and choose the number of players you want.
- Ask everyone to hold their key at the same time in a game such as Red Light Green Light or Fruit Rain.
- Watch whether every player moves. If one stays still, press that key together with the others and note which combination fails.
If it is always the same player, the problem is the combination of that key with the other held keys, not the person or the game.
Fixes that work
- Use a different keyboard. A mechanical or gaming keyboard with N-key rollover is the most reliable solution.
- Add a second keyboard. Each USB keyboard reports its own presses, so plugging in a second keyboard often helps. A full-size keyboard also gives you the numeric keypad that the seventh player (Pink, Numpad 0) needs.
- Play with fewer players. Four or five players usually works on almost any keyboard.
- Try wired over wireless. Some wireless keyboards, especially compact ones, report fewer simultaneous keys than their wired versions.
Which keys does each player use?
Red uses C, Blue uses N, Green uses P, Yellow uses Q, Orange uses the Left arrow, Purple uses the Right arrow and Pink uses Numpad 0. The keys are spread across the keyboard so that players are not on top of each other, which already helps a lot. You can see the full list on the How to Play page.
Bottom line
If your laptop struggles with seven players, you have not done anything wrong. Switch to six, borrow a full-size keyboard, or let the group take turns. Everyone playing a slightly smaller game is better than one person quietly losing because their key was blocked.