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How to play board games online with your friends

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Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#31
For those with a more wargaming lean, VASSAL is an amazing toolkit.

Full Java app, and modules for hundreds of games all the way back to the original version of Tactics from AH.

I've personally done a bit of improvements on Fifth Frontier War, from ye olde Traveller universe.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#32
post #3

I was hoping this was going to be how to modify boardgames to play with friends via webcam. We played Monopoly, and had good success - one board, setup a ghost player for the remote people. Remote people used parts of a set to keep track of their money and properties. Later several hours. >In my experience, Zoom is the most consistent service and works on almost any device. One person in your group will need a paid s…

My group has been doing a similar thing - except that video quality has been to unreliable for some of the more detailed boards (Troyes, Power Grid). We needed the ability to pinch and zoom the board. We’ve been using an app called iPhotoBot to take high res shots every few seconds. These get uploaded to Dropbox. Then there is a web server of a synced folder which builds a page of the images. Server-sent events are u…

Wow, that sounds pretty cool though! I wonder if there are any video services that offer pinch-to-zoom.

An alternative would be to open a video chat in your browser. Then, on a Mac, you can zoom in with your touchpad. But I think zooming on the page in any browser should work, right?

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#33
post #4
post #3

I was hoping this was going to be how to modify boardgames to play with friends via webcam. We played Monopoly, and had good success - one board, setup a ghost player for the remote people. Remote people used parts of a set to keep track of their money and properties. Later several hours. >In my experience, Zoom is the most consistent service and works on almost any device. One person in your group will need a paid s…

"We played Monopoly, and had good success" Unlikely. What a tedious game

Apparently almost everyone is playing with the same "house rules" that make the game awful. Free parking is not a rule and just makes the game go longer. Not automatically putting up unpurchased properties for auction is also a big rule to miss.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#35

For those with a more wargaming lean, VASSAL is an amazing toolkit. Full Java app, and modules for hundreds of games all the way back to the original version of Tactics from AH. I've personally done a bit of improvements on Fifth Frontier War, from ye olde Traveller universe.

Yeah, VASSAL is a good alternative to TTS! I left it out because I'm personally not into war games which feels like it's strength. But I would definitely be open to learning it and adding it to the article.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#36

I wish there was something Flash-like, even easier probably, what would let you make multiplayer board games easily. A board game essentially is just a simple set of pictures you move around + a chat + a dice perhaps. This sounds fairly easy to implement.

Look at VASSAL - it's primarily been used for wargaming but modules can be made with lots of different mechanics, and the more recent abilities to build automated rule behavior get better and better.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#37

There's this Codenames clone [1] that's great, you can play in multiples languages and you don't need to share a screen to play. It's for 4-8 players and it's easy to play. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codenames_(board_game) [1] https://www.horsepaste.com/

Awesome, thanks for the link! I'm working on an addendum to the article for game-specific sites. This is perfect.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#39
post #3

I was hoping this was going to be how to modify boardgames to play with friends via webcam. We played Monopoly, and had good success - one board, setup a ghost player for the remote people. Remote people used parts of a set to keep track of their money and properties. Later several hours. >In my experience, Zoom is the most consistent service and works on almost any device. One person in your group will need a paid s…

I'm kinda surprised by all the hate on Monopoly.

It's a great game for learning. It teaches you to take risks early and slowly lower your risk tolerance over time to let your existing assets appreciate. It teaches you that the best values are at the extremes of real estate: you want to be either a luxury condo owner or a slum lord. It teaches you that capitalism isn't fair, because good strategy and hard work don't pay off if you don't get lucky. Come to think of it, maybe that last one is why HN doesn't like it. ;P

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#40

+1 for Tabletop Simulator, one of my children taught themselves Blender in the process of creating and uploading a game for TTS.

TTS is a such a blast. I have a group of five friends who play Wingspan every week and the winner gets to flip the table. Such a satisfying experience! Also, secretly making your opponents pieces slightly bigger or smaller can be a fun way to stay occupied between turns.
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