The story · and a review
I kept running out of date ideas. Then I found LDR Date.
This is the site that got me out of it, and one of the reasons Angie exists at all. We've now teamed up with them, so I want to tell you where they actually came from in my life.
Before Angie existed I was just a guy in a long distance relationship with no ideas left.
The first few months are easy. You have a year of things to tell each other. Then you run out. You get on the call, you both say "how was your day," you get through that in four minutes, and then you're just two faces looking at each other. So you put something on Netflix and you're not really watching it and you're not really talking either. I did that for weeks.
I tried searching for date ideas. If you've done this you know how bad it is. Every list is the same twelve things, half of them need you to be in the same city, and they're all written by someone who has clearly never had to do it. "Take a walk together while on the phone!" Sure. "Cook the same meal!" We tried that one, it was fine, it took two hours of planning for one evening.
How I found them
A video came across my feed. Someone playing a colour matching game with their partner — a colour shows up for a second, disappears, and you both try to make it again on sliders. That's it, that's the whole game.
I don't know why that one landed. I think it was the reaction at the end when they showed each other what they'd made and it was nowhere close. It looked like the couple was actually having a good time, which is not what those videos usually look like.
The video was from LDR Date. I went to the site that night and we played the colour game on our call, and then we just kept going down their list.
We did the escape room. We did the tier lists. We did the coloring page thing that I was sure would be boring. Over the next month or so we got through most of what they had, and for the first time in a while I wasn't dreading the "so what do you want to do" part of the call.
Then I started building Angie. Not because of any one idea on their site, but because of the thing their site proved to me: the evening is fine as soon as there's something to do in it. The distance wasn't the problem. The empty call was the problem. That's basically the whole idea Angie is built on, and I got it from playing their list for a month.
So when they emailed us about working together, that was an easy yes.
What their site is actually like
Since I'm recommending it, here's the honest version.
It's run by Vanessa and Mehrad, who did four years at a twelve hour time difference. That number matters. Six hours is annoying. Twelve means one of you is eating breakfast while the other is going to bed, every day, and any overlap you get costs somebody sleep. You can tell from the writing that they've had to solve real evenings, not theoretical ones.
What's good: the ideas are specific and most of them are free. They tell you what you need and roughly how long it takes. They don't pad. And a lot of them account for the thing every other list ignores, which is that one of you is tired and the date has to survive that anyway. There's no "plan a whole themed evening" energy. It's stuff you can start in two minutes.
What I'd change: it's a browse, not a search. There's no way to say "I have forty minutes and no energy, show me that" — which is the exact state I was in every time I went looking. I'd also love a filter for time-zone-hostile couples, because a few of the ideas assume you're both awake and alert at the same moment and some of us are not. Minor stuff. I still had it bookmarked for a year.
Who it's for: if your calls have gone quiet and you don't want another app to install, start there. It's a shortlist from people who needed one.
The six I'd start with
These are the ones we actually played, and I'm rating them by effort, not by how good they are. The low effort ones aren't worse. They're what you can manage on a bad week.
01
Long Distance Questions
Low effort · for when one of you is exhausted
A deck of conversation cards. You take turns reading them.
This is the one I reach for on the nights when neither of us has anything, because it takes away the hard part, which is deciding what to talk about. Neither of you has to be interesting. You just read the card.
The good ones are slightly too direct to ask on your own. We got into two conversations off cards like these that I don't think we would have started otherwise.
02
Multiplayer coloring date
Low effort · barely a game, which is the point
One page, both of you filling it in at the same time.
I thought this would be boring and I was wrong. What you miss in long distance isn't big events, it's sitting near someone doing nothing much. Colouring the same picture from two countries gets weirdly close to that. Nobody wins, there's nothing to keep up with, and we talked more than usual because our hands were busy.
Good for a night when a competitive game would be too much.
03
The Hogwarts escape room
High effort · give it a whole evening
A free digital escape room, and a long one. Don't start it at 11pm on a work night. I did, and I regret it.
Escape rooms work for long distance because you can't do them alone and you can't speed it up by taking over. One of you spots the thing the other missed, then it flips, for an hour. We still bring up the puzzle we got stuck on.
If you like it there are dozens of these online. Finishing one together felt more like a shared memory than most things we did on a call.
04
Make a tier list together
Medium effort · will start one argument
Rank anything. Snacks. Your friends' relationships. Every place you've been together. Drag them into rows from S down to F.
This works because it's a fight you both want to have. I found out that a restaurant I thought was a big deal for us is, in her words, "a solid B." We're past it now.
It also scales down. A ten minute tier list of biscuits is a complete date if you're both busy.
05
Actual personality tests
Medium effort · the results are the date, not the test
They point at the real ones instead of the "which pasta are you" ones, which I appreciated, because the comparing is the fun part.
One thing we did that I'd recommend: take it as each other. You answer as if you were them, they answer as if they were you, then you put all four results side by side. The gap between how you see yourself and how they see you is where the evening actually is. We got an hour out of that.
06
The colour matching game
Low effort · the one that started all of this
The one from the video. A colour appears, you look at it for a second, it's gone, and you rebuild it on three sliders.
Real scores from one of our rounds. I was very confident about that last one.
You'll be worse at this than you think. Your memory keeps the name of the colour, "dusty purple", and then you rebuild from the name, so almost everyone's attempt comes out too bright. Their write-up calls it "surprisingly addictive," which I think undersells it.
The one they link to is dialed.gg, a nice little single player game with a daily challenge. Worth a look on its own.
Here's the part I still find funny. The bit I loved was the reaction at the end, and that reaction needs two people, but the game was built for one. So a year later, with an actual company, I built the two player version. It's on Angie now as Color Match — same idea, both of you playing at once, plus a mode where one of you can see the colour and has to describe it while the other one mixes blind. That mode is the one we play.
Angie × LDR Date
The full story of how this happened →
How we plan our weeks now
Not a schedule. Nobody keeps a schedule. But this is the shape that stuck:
One night that takes nothing out of us, where neither of us has to be entertaining. The question cards, the coloring page. One night with something at stake, because a bit of competition wakes a call up. A tier list, the colour game. And every few weeks one big one we actually put in the calendar, like the escape room. Almost everything I remember from that year came from those.
The one thing I'd add from my side is to sometimes do something that leaves an object behind. Long distance is short on physical evidence. That's the reason I built the photobooth the way I did, with both cameras firing at the same instant so you end up in one strip together. Having one of those stuck on a fridge does something a screenshot doesn't.
Go read theirs
I'm not being modest for the sake of it. If you're trying to fix one specific evening this week, a shortlist from a couple who did four years at twelve hours apart will get you further than another app to install. Start there. Then come back for the one they gave me.
Worth saying plainly: LDR Date and Angie are doing a swap. They're making a video about our photobooth, I wrote this. No money changed hands either way, and nobody got to approve the other's copy — the review above is mine, including the part about what I'd change. Their ideas and write-ups are theirs, the single player colour game they link to is dialed.gg, and Angie's Color Match is our own build. Effort ratings are my opinion and you're welcome to disagree, especially about the tier list.
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