In 2022, EA reported that The Sims 4 players spent 1.4 billion hours creating neighborhoods, families, and businesses—constructing fantasies and watching them play out in their own time. It’s easy to believe, considering my most recent save file alone is well over a hundred hours long.

Yet even with all the chaos I can create in the base game, it’s The Sims 4’s expansions that have been keeping me busy as of late. New mechanics (from the mythic to the mundane), juicy storylines, unique biomes, quirky mise-en-scene—there’s a lot to explore.

Most recently, I’ve been spending my time with The Sims 4’s Get Together expansion. Get Together enables players to take a stab at club ownership. See, your custom clubs aren’t just for curating cool nights out. They can also bring specific residents together, fostering new friendships within your suburban tapestry.

But for me—nice as that sentiment is—Get Together is all about creating the most intense drama possible. From dive bars to high-end nightclubs or humble board game meetups, Get Together lets you mess with your town's social hierarchy and sow discord amongst its closest cliques.
 

Jenny, the first experiment

Now, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a sucker for reality tv, with the likes of Married at First Sight and Love is Blind always managing to worm their way back onto my watchlists. But an episodic series demands that I wait whole days or even weekends to watch thrilling events like dinner parties and commitment ceremonies unravel into screaming matches. With The Sims 4: Get Together, I quickly realized I could create my own virtual pressure cooker scenarios without any of the ethical concerns.

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail, and so my first experimental household served as a dry run for future club creations. Meet Jenny, a solo-living party animal who loves dancing, music, and good food. Her preordained personality traits dictated the clubs she’d be a good fit for, with factors like socioeconomic status, marital situation, age, and affinity for skills like cooking or painting fleshing out a proverbial social fact file that can be drawn upon when setting up evenings in Get Together.

Ready to build my own Berghain, I dropped Jenny into the only affordable lot in the European-inspired region of Windenburg, an area full of beam-clad buildings and wildly unaffordable housing. Not wanting to waste any time, I entered a few “motherlodes” (a.k.a. instant money cheats for you non-The Sims players) to provide a budget for my architectural exploits.

When making a club in Get Together, you can choose to use an existing public space or create a new lot for a more specific feel. With Jenny, I wanted to create an environment where she could party all night and sleep all day, so I converted her home into a multi-purpose event hall. The expansion includes plenty of party-specific wares like serviceable bars, DJ booths, and disco lighting to get you on your way.

Even with decades of decorating experience, I couldn't make my home-turned-club look cool—but at least it was ready for punters. The neighborhood welcoming committee knocked before I was ready, but this turned into a well-timed trial run where I tested the efficacy of the space.

Jenny hired a killer DJ and a mixologist, and the party kicked off. Drinks were flowing, and Jenny was throwing it down on the dance floor so hard that her bravery had managed to summon a crowd.

But just as the event was coming to an end, Jenny got a call to hit up another party across town. I couldn’t have asked for a better result. Within seconds, I was transported to a manor house lit up with laser lights, a prime location to stir up some drama. Once you join a club in Get Together, you can bad-mouth its leader to others to get some juicy info—or if you really wanna shake things up, you can even attempt to convince the leader to step down.

However, Jenny was more interested in flirting with anyone and everyone that would listen. One particular pink-haired vixen caught her eye, and things started heating up. I quickly learned that Candy was a member of the Spin Masters, a DJ collective that hosts regular parties in the area—which was ideal as, when the sun rose, it was time to move the party somewhere new. Jenny was living like Lady Gaga circa 2008—”No sleep! Bus, club, another club, another club, plane, next place.”

Stefanie, the scorned celebrity

The most compelling sell for the Get Together expansion is how it acts as a nexus for other expansions, folding them into the club creation system. Suppose you’re all about the fantasy elements found in Werewolves, Vampires, and Realm of Magic. In that case, you can make spooky clubs which reflect your special interests. If that isn’t your thing, you can lean on the family-oriented expansions to try and conjure the most absurd strobe-lit book club imaginable.

While I was having plenty of fun becoming a club kid, I was still seeking elite melodrama, and Jenny was just too lighthearted to cause any beef. So, after some awkward romantic interactions and a rather dramatic belly flop in the pool, I started again with a new household—this time investing in the features of the Hollywood-oriented Get Famous expansion to drum up some extra hierarchical heat.

Enter siblings Stefanie and Grant, a fame-hungry duo living in the Del Sol Valley. I intended to follow my previous methodology of the home-nightclub blend—but a lot more lavish and exclusive this time around. Ignoring the customary housewarming entirely, I got straight to business by joining the pre-set Good Times club at a local bar to grind out my prestige.

The bar was bouncing, with celebrities filtering in and out long enough for Stefanie to steal some of their shine. Much like the real world, celebrity associations can make you famous yourself, so Stefanie shamelessly wormed her way into all kinds of situations—with limited results. Miffed, I succumbed to cheats a second time and forced her into global A-list status. With everyone fawning over her, I just needed a picky venue where people could venerate Stefanie’s status, and so Deluxe ‘n’ Fancy was born.

Setting my sights on the town’s modern art museum, I wanted young, rich, and famous romantics at the helm of this ship. Just one small hitch: There weren't any. I needed to lower my standards quite a bit, settling eventually for middle-aged B-listers to flesh out the club’s ranks. Wasting no time, a meeting was called, and the seven wannabes made their way to the venue.

It must have been only a few seconds before the paparazzi and fans swarmed, exactly what you’d want from the hottest club in town. Stefanie’s behavior became erratic amid all the attention. She’d flirt and take photos with fans, then run outside to scrap with a shutterbug.

Things took a turn for the worse when Stefanie walked out of the bathroom to see her love interest making out with a comparative nobody. Appalled, she expelled the interloper who had previously preached about joining the club just to meet Stef. This upsetting bombshell capped off an evening of glitz, coinciding with the addition of the Self-Absorbed trait to Stefanie’s fragile personality.

Within seconds of getting back to her home-nightclub—one can never truly escape the party—Stefanie began crying and would not stop, eventually bawling her eyes out in the center of the dance floor.

It was pure cinema. I had pushed my Sim to their emotional limits—and to be fair, I was starting to feel bad about it now. Her heart was broken, and she was acting unhinged while her brother was living it up off the back of her notoriety. It turns out fame really does change people.

If I learned anything from my expeditions into club creation, it’s that The Sims 4: Get Together is a surprisingly complex tool for creating and manipulating group cultures and dynamics. It sounds sinister—and it definitely can be—but it’s been a better use of my evenings than going out in the freezing cold and paying absurd prices for watered-down drinks.

My dream of conjuring the ultimate night out is still on the horizon, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of gossip to spill when it launches. For now, though, I probably need to give my test subjects a breather and take them on a trip somewhere nice. Maybe indulge their more introverted hobbies.

You can download The Sims 4 for free on the Epic Games Store, as well as the Get Together expansion and—if you’re ready to go all-in—a lot more The Sims 4 DLC.