How Many Games?

With not playing chess for several years due to nobody ever wanting to play me how many games should I play at one time online? Would love to play loads but is this wise?

There was a thread on this a month or two ago and the consensus seemed to be that people playing hundreds of games at a time can't really give sufficient attention to their games.  Most people seemed to want no more than 15 or so and others felt that they could comfortably manage 50.  Obviously your time control setting is also a determining factor.  As long as you are comfortable with the work load and not timing out on folks then bite off as much as you can chew.

It's easy enough to add games, so your best approach is probably to start with a fairly small number, and if you're comfortable with the amount of time they're taking, add in a few more games.  Adding in stages, maybe 2 to 5 games at a time, also allows you to have your ongoing games spread out through various stages-- some still in the opening that don't take much time per move, some in middle game, some closing in on the final few moves.

If you start entering tournaments, depending on the tournament you'll have multiple games starting all at once.  For instance, all of the monthly official chess.com tournaments have groups of 6 players, which means when the tournament (and each subsequent round, if you advance) starts you have 10 new games start up on that day.  Other tournaments might have anywhere from 2 to 12 games start up with each round, and most of the time you don't know ahead of time what date that's going to happen, so you need to keep that in mind if you're trying to keep your number of ongoing games within a fairly tight range.