Mini golf is inherently social. The joy of the sport has never been about perfecting your stroke technique or reading greens with mathematical precision. It’s about watching your friend’s ball bounce off a windmill blade and into a water hazard while you somehow sink a hole-in-one through pure luck. Golf With Your Friends understands this fundamental truth and builds its entire experience around it.
The game carved out a dedicated following during its Early Access period and solidified it after its full release in 2020. Community sentiment is warmly positive with clear boundaries. Players love it as a group activity and describe it as one of the best games to play on voice chat with friends. Those same players admit that playing solo against AI or strangers generates almost none of the same enjoyment. The game lives and dies by the company you keep while playing it.
Twelve Players, One Windmill, Total Chaos
The course design is where Golf With Your Friends earns its keep. The base game includes multiple themed courses that range from haunted mansions to pirate coves to ancient temples, each with distinct visual personalities and hole layouts. The best courses embrace absurdity, featuring loops, ramps, gravity-defying paths, and obstacles that turn each hole into a miniature puzzle. Figuring out the optimal route through a particularly tricky hole becomes its own minigame within the larger competition.
Supporting up to twelve players simultaneously creates a visual spectacle that other mini golf games can’t match. Watching a dozen balls launch off a ramp in different directions, collide mid-air, and scatter across the course produces reliable comedy. The game wisely lets all players putt simultaneously rather than taking turns, which keeps the pace fast and eliminates the downtime that kills party game momentum.
Game mode variety extends the formula beyond standard mini golf. Hockey mode replaces balls with pucks on ice rinks. Basketball mode adds hoops to the courses. The power-up mode, which gives players abilities like freezing opponents’ balls or launching them off the course, transforms skill-based competition into gleeful sabotage. These modes aren’t deep, but they prevent the core experience from growing stale during longer play sessions.
Steam Workshop support allows the community to create and share custom courses, and the best community creations rival or exceed the quality of official content. Popular workshop courses include recreations of famous real-world locations, impossible trick-shot challenges, and deliberately unfair courses designed to maximize frustration comedy. This user-generated content pipeline keeps the game relevant years after its official course roster was finalized.
The Solo Player’s Bunker
Playing alone exposes the game’s shallow foundations. Without friends providing commentary and competition, Golf With Your Friends is a simple physics-based mini golf game with no progression system, no narrative, and no reward structure. The AI opponents are functional but lifeless, providing numerical competition without the social friction that makes the game fun. Solo players exhaust what the game offers within a few hours and have little reason to return.
The physics engine, while adequate for party play, frustrates players looking for consistency. Ball behavior on slopes and near walls can feel unpredictable, with identical shots producing different results in ways that seem random rather than physics-driven. Competitive players who want to optimize their routes find that the physics sometimes reward luck over skill, which is fine in a party context but maddening when trying to improve.
The base game’s course selection, while varied in theme, can feel repetitive in layout philosophy. Many holes rely on the same design tricks: narrow ledges, bouncing obstacles, and split paths where one route is obviously better but harder to execute. DLC courses add fresh environments but don’t always introduce new mechanical ideas. After playing through all available content, the courses start to blur together.
Online matchmaking with strangers highlights the game’s dependence on social context. Public lobbies are quiet, with players silently putting through courses without any of the banter that makes the game special. There’s no ranking system, no seasonal content, and no incentive structure to keep random online matches interesting. The game assumes you’re bringing your own entertainment in the form of friends, and it’s right to assume that, but the result is an online mode that feels hollow without them.
The Party Game Paradox
Golf With Your Friends faces a challenge common to all party games: the product itself is only half the experience. The other half is the people you play with. A great party game creates moments that wouldn’t happen without the game’s specific systems, and Golf With Your Friends does this well. The power-up mode in particular creates betrayal moments and come-from-behind victories that become stories your group retells. But strip away the social layer, and what remains is a competent but unremarkable mini golf game that wouldn’t hold anyone’s attention for long.
Should You Play Golf With Your Friends?
If you have a regular group of three or more friends looking for a low-commitment multiplayer game, this is an excellent choice. The price point is low, the skill floor is ground level, and the chaos scales beautifully with player count. Skip it entirely if you’re planning to play solo. This is not a game that pretends to offer a compelling single-player experience, and you shouldn’t pretend it does either.
The Verdict on Golf With Your Friends
Golf With Your Friends delivers exactly what its title promises: a golf game built for group play. The course design is creative, the multiplayer chaos is reliably entertaining, and the Workshop support ensures fresh content. It lacks depth, consistency, and any reason to play alone, but those aren’t really the point. Grab it on sale with a group of friends, and it will pay for itself in laughter within an hour. That’s a fair deal for a game that never claims to be more than it is.