开黑

What does 开黑 mean?

“开黑吗?” That question is how a generation of Chinese gamers made plans. 开黑 means queuing as a premade group instead of solo-queueing with strangers: you, your friends, voice chat on, coordination rehearsed for months. 开 is “to open” or “to start,” and the 黑 comes from 黑店, a “black shop.” A five-stack is 五黑, a trio is 三黑, and the opposite is 单排, solo queue. Rivals have their own view of premades, which is that five friends in one lobby is closer to a mugging than a match. The word itself carries no stigma. Plenty of people made their closest friends in 开黑 sessions that ran until four in the morning and outlasted the game they were playing.

Where does 开黑 come from?

黑店 is an old Chinese term for an inn that robs its guests. Early DOTA players, around 2008 to 2010, borrowed it for the premade teams that stomped public matches: walk into the black shop, lose your win. It was meant as an insult and it outlived the insult. League of Legends made MOBAs mainstream in China and 王者荣耀 finished the job on phones, so by the mid-2010s 开黑 was simply the verb for playing with friends. You can hear how far it travelled in the phrase that follows it: 上号开黑, “log on and squad up,” a complete plan in four characters.

How to use 开黑

• 周末别睡了，上号开黑！
  Zhōumò bié shuì le, shàng hào kāi hēi!
  Stop sleeping in this weekend — log on and queue up with the squad!
• 我们五黑车队，缺个辅助，来吗？
  Wǒmen wǔ hēi chēduì, quē ge fǔzhù, lái ma?
  Our five-stack is short a support — you in?