Over the years, the Raspberry Pi SBCs have brought numerous types of projects to life. For coders, you’ve got LAMP web servers, Flask websites, and portable Kali Linux workstations. Meanwhile, home lab enthusiasts can use these tiny boards to build a reliable Docker ecosystem that includes everything from the containers to management/orchestration platforms like Portainer and Kubernetes. Then there are the more practical projects like media servers, NAS, VPN machines, and Home Assistant hubs.

Traverse deep enough into the Raspberry Pi landscape, and you’ll even find projects for gamers. So, here’s a list of cool gaming ideas you can bring to life with your credit card-sized companion.

5 Game server manager

Hosting LAN parties on your Raspberry Pi

From providing an isolated environment for your companions to test wacky mods to enjoying a tranquil LAN party experience without interference from random players, hosting private game servers has plenty of use-cases. So long as your crew isn’t too big, you can host casual game servers on your Raspberry Pi instead of searching for dedicated hardware for all your game-hosting needs.

As for the titles, you can easily host lobbies for mainstream games like Terraria, Minecraft, and Palworld, though it’s the retro gaming servers that work exceedingly well on a Raspberry Pi. And for tinkerers who don’t mind getting their hands dirty, you can even try deploying a Pterodactyl server to further expand the repertoire of titles you can host on your SBC.

4 Android gaming machine

For the few games worth playing on Android

The Android gaming industry may be rife with pay-to-win titles that have more ads and premium transactions than the actual in-game content, but there are a few gems worth experiencing on the platform. With PC developers porting lesser-demanding titles like Dead Cells, Stardew Valley, and Terraria over to the Android ecosystem, there’s even more incentive for Raspberry Pi owners to jump into the mobile gaming scene.

OS-wise, you’ve got plenty of choices, with LineageOS, Emteria, AOSP, and OmniROM bringing their own set of features to the table. While the performance of the Raspberry Pi SBCs is nothing to write home about, you can still enjoy quite a few classical PC titles and hidden Android gems on these distros. And I can’t conclude this section without mentioning FydeOS, a Chromium-based distro that features a robust and high-performance Android subsystem.

3 DIY Gamepad

Or better yet, an entire portable gaming machine!

If you’re a fan of retro gaming or portable game devices, you can put together a perfectly operational gamepad using your Raspberry Pi. While it requires some coding skills and technical know-how to interface the buttons and circuits with the GPIO pins, you can assemble a decent controller without shelling out a lot of money on the components.

For tinkerers who love working with different modules, you can take the project to the next level by designing the entire game station with your Raspberry Pi. Of course, you’ll have to interface a display module and 3D print the chassis, but it’s a satisfactory project if you want to build your own handheld gaming machine.

2 Game streaming client

To turn your monitors and dumb TVs into smart displays

The Raspberry Pi may not be able to run demanding titles at 4K60FPS… but it can stream your games when you pair it with your war machine of a PC. With Valve officially bringing support for Steam Link to the Raspberry Pi 5, all you have to do is install the Steam Link package using the APT repository.

But if Steam Link introduces too much latency to your games, you can also check out the Moonlight and Parsec clients, as both apps run well on the Raspberry Pi. The former is a bit difficult to configure but yields the best results. On the flipside, Parsec has slightly higher latency (at least in my tests), though it's really easy to set up and just as useful for remote desktop workloads.

1 Emulation station

Capable of running tons of classical titles

If you’re a fan of retro gaming, you’ll have a blast with your Raspberry Pi. For starters, modern Raspberry Pi SBCs pack enough horsepower to emulate several gaming consoles, ranging from the good ol’ Atari and Sega systems to the (relatively) newer devices like PS1, Wii, and PSP.

Plus, there’s a slew of emulation-centric platforms you can try out on your Raspberry Pi emulation station. There’s Batocera, Recalbox, and Lakka, which combine an intuitive UI with support for multiple emulation cores, cheats, and other features. Meanwhile, RetroPie is designed for tinkerers who want the maximum functionality out of their Raspberry Pi. But if you’re not willing to dedicate your project-building SBC to an emulation distro, you can configure the RetroArch package on top of your existing Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS.

All work and no play makes the Raspberry Pi a killjoy

Those were some fun ways to use your Raspberry Pi to satisfy your gaming needs, but there are two more projects worth mentioning. With Pi-Apps letting you install Steam on the Raspberry Pi OS, you could technically try running PC titles on the device. Unfortunately, you’ll need an external GPU to avoid turning every game into a slideshow, and the driver compatibility issues could turn this project into a real hassle.

Alternatively, you could use your Raspberry Pi as a makeshift NAS to store your PC games if you’ve run out of space on your local hardware and don’t wish to invest in a dedicated storage server. But I hesitate to recommend it because the slow speeds of the microSD card and the 1 Gigabit Ethernet port make this project more of a cool experiment than something you should use on a daily basis.