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How to play board games online with your friends

masilotti.com

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Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#141

Post by mariusz331 »

polishdude20 wrote: post #139
mariusz331 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey nice to meet another Polish dude! We use Twilio's Video SDK and their P2P rooms. This works fine for most users on desktops and good internet. When I play with friends in CA (I'm in NY), I don't experience any serious issues. Sometimes there's feedback when a user has their speakers blasting. Many of our users experience problems on mobile when there are a lot of players in the room. We're thinking about switchin…

How much do you guys spend per month on the Twilio API if you don't mind me asking? We are currently running our site on an ovh server for $5 a month with no problems since we don't have a crazy amount of users.

Haha definitely not the cheapest project I've built. Happy to share specific with you over email: mariusz at cyberspaces dot app

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#142

Post by joemasilotti »

theaeolist wrote: post #15

Any similar suggestions for card games, especially Poker?

You could try http://playingcards.io/

It's effectively a 52 card sandbox. You can also invite other players with a unique URL. Each player has their own "hand" private to others.

The controls seems a tad clunky but it should work for just about any card game!

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#143

Post by mariusz331 »

j2bax wrote: post #129
mariusz331 wrote: post #19

We're working on an app for social/board games with built in video chat: https://www.cyberspaces.app Current we offer: Boggle (just released yesterday, feedback is especially appreciated) https://www.cyberspaces.app/boggle Codenames (we call it Cyberterms) https://www.cyberspaces.app/cyberterms Liar's Dice https://www.cyberspaces.app/liarsdice Kings https://www.cyberspaces.app/kings

Not sure which country you are in, or if you care at all but you might want to avoid using trademarked game titles like Boggle to avoid any legal disputes. Perhaps a subtle nod like Bogly or something would be enough to let people know the general game...

Thank you! We'll definitely look into changing the names to avoid legal issues.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#144

Post by 0az »

vehementi wrote: post #115
joemasilotti wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does everyone need a Discord account to join the call? The big benefit (for me) of Zoom is that I can send a link to anyone and they don't need an account. Asking someone to sign up for a Board Game Arena account AND Discord would be too much.

Vast majority of people IME already use Discord for many things anyway

"Gamer" community bias, IME, as well as other internet-age communities.

It's not the most general platform, but it's one of the best at what it does: voice and text. Video is just icing on top.

If Discord had a version suitably branded for Business, I'd say it'd be better than Zoom and Slack combined.

It just works.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#145

Post by _pastel »

joemasilotti wrote: post #57
mcv wrote: post #22

The site in the leading image is not mentioned elsewhere in the article, but it's Dominion, which can be played at https://dominion.games/ (Disclaimer: the online version is developed by a friend of mine. Not the original physical game of course, which is the best-selling game by Donald X. Vaccarino.)

Oh, wow... I can't believe I forgot to add that site! I literally used it last night and that photo is of me and my friends.

I enjoyed that you have a Base Set strategy guide open at the same time as you're playing.

Looks like a rough game. Why did you buy the last Cellar to end the game when you were behind?

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#146

Post by blahedo »

pidg wrote: post #67

I wish there was a way to do this but with popular/classic board and card games instead. My friends are, for the most part, not board game nerds. They want to play commercially successful games like Trivial Pursuit, Balderdash, Uno, etc. We've had a real struggle to find a sensible way of playing them. Eventually we just had one household point a webcam at a physical copy of Trivial Pursuit and everyone else play via…

boardgamearena supports a whole bunch of classic card (Hearts etc) and board games (Checkers etc).

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#147

Post by _pastel »

mcv wrote: post #22

The site in the leading image is not mentioned elsewhere in the article, but it's Dominion, which can be played at https://dominion.games/ (Disclaimer: the online version is developed by a friend of mine. Not the original physical game of course, which is the best-selling game by Donald X. Vaccarino.)

Is your friend doing okay? The site seems pretty slammed. Looks like they finally got the ratings updater back online after it went down a few weeks ago.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#148

Post by phlamb »

Splendor wrote: post #119

Has anyone found an easy solution for video chats with virtual games? I've tried Hangouts, Meet, Discord, and Zoom but they all seemed incomplete for my requirements. My requirements: - Host can share their screen and video camera at the same time without having to join the meeting from two different devices - Desktop audio and host's audio can be heard by everyone on the call - Gallery view in video chat so everyone…

I found Skype to be the easiest to use with these requirements. I hosted a Jackbox game and was able to share my screen (and game audio), my webcam (albeit in a smaller view than normal), and could see everyone in a gallery view.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#149

Post by caffeinewriter »

kashyapc wrote: post #78

A few weeks ago I tried Tabletop Simulator with two other friends to play Gloomhaven[+]. I admire the developers that took on such a (positively) complex and rich game as Gloomhaven. But it was a far cry from in-person playing (I realize). It's very much understandable—you just can't replicate that high-definition feeling you get from in-person game, especially from such a rich game. I was 'dejected' (again, that's n…

There are definitely some games that just don't translate as well to Tabletop Sim, but as far as shared tabletop experiences, TTS blows every other one I've tried out of the water on the widest variety of games. I use it for D&D, Wizards' Academy, and I own about half of the official DLC games.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#150

Post by antsar »

joemasilotti wrote: post #32
kickscondor wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Resolution might be a problem, since you're just looking more closely at the same pixelated full-board video you were already receiving.

If the VC software was smart enough to detect your pinch action and send you a cropped feed at higher resolution from the source, that's a different story. Not sure if any existing tools do this.

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