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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

#181

Post by blakeburch »

zaneyard wrote: post #137
blakeburch wrote: post #84

Austin has a local board game Meetup group that's shifted entirely to Tabletop Simulator during this time. It's great and definitely maintains the best feeling of playing a physical board game. I'm surprised that the author didn't mention the hundreds of games that you can download for free in the Steam Workshop as mods. Not all of them work flawlessly, so you have to test things out beforehand. However, the almost u…

I've been looking at moving to Austin and love board games. Unfortunately with everything canceled I can't currently use Meetup to check out the scene. Would you mind talking a little bit about what the board game scene is normally like in the area?

Sure thing! I'm caveating this with the fact that I've only been in the area for 2 years now. After I found some good groups, I haven't actively looked as often.

Meetups - Austin is pretty heavily split between North/South of Town Lake (Lady Bird Lake). A lot of people don't "cross the line". - North Austin has a lot more gaming groups than the South Austin region, at an estimated ratio of 3:1. - A majority of groups meet at local game stores, but there are a few that meet at restaurants and breweries (which I prefer the vibe of). - Most groups meet in the evenings on weekdays. I haven't seen many weekend groups, unfortunately. - Most groups play a wide variety of modern games, so you'll always be learning new games. There are very few groups if you like the "classics" (Monopoly, Life, Sorry, Catan, etc.) - Most groups are decently sized, with anywhere from 10-30 folks showing up on a weekly basis.

Locations - Austin has a small, but high-quality selection of Board Game cafes. Favorites are Vigilante and Emerald Tavern. - Austin has a lot of local game stores. One of the more heavily trafficked ones is Dragon's Lair.

Conventions - Austin has a yearly board game convention with a great group of regulars (https://www.boardgamebash.com/) - You're only 3 hours away from the Dallas/Fort Worth area which holds BGG.con in both the Spring and Fall (https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/BGGCON). Biggest board game convention in the US next to GenCon. - You also have PAX South in January held in San Antonio, only 1.5 hours away.

Other Notes - There's a really welcoming community of 20-30 folks that meets once per month to help board game designers get feedback and playtest their games. One of my favorite recent finds. - There used to be a REALLY popular weekly meetup that was specifically for heavy games (2+ hours) that pulled in a crowd of 30-40 folks, but it got dissolved and never really had a replacement. I'm not sure what happened, but there is more of a demand for that here. - It's an unfortunate truth that the board game hobby can sometimes cater to some...interesting characters. From my experience, there's MUCH LESS of that in Austin and everyone has been super friendly and welcoming.

I hope that helps! If you're interested in more info, feel free to reach out to me. Email is just my username@gmail.com.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#182

Post by the_gipsy »

vanattab wrote: post #58
kerkeslager wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

"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.” I thought the best properties in Monopoly where the opposite of this? It's my understanding that the best properties in Monopoly are orange followed by green then either red or yellow. Mostly the middle of the road properties. Orange is the best because it's approximately a 7 roll away…

The best properties are the cheapest (brown and teal, then purple or orange). Houses are cheap, buy until there are no more left (don't buy hotels). You now have the Monopoly of houses. Sit back and collect money.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#183

Post by iso947 »

RustyRussell wrote: post #172

We played Pandemic with great success: the other couple had the game too, put all their cards face up so they could find them fast. We drew for everyone, they mirrored. That avoids complexities of camera resolution, and lets you examine other players at a glance: important for a co-op game. (Yeah, I deliberately bought Pandemic just as we entered isolation since I've always wanted it and obvious reasons).

Had deliberately avoided playing it this year, too depressing.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#184

Post by distances »

tln wrote: post #49

"a tad clunky"? Every single person I've shown boardgamearena.com has commented on the subpar UX. But then we play a few games of Coup and all is good :) https://acquire.tlstyer.com/ is a good implementation of Acquire

On the other hand, we found boardgamearena.com very, very polished after trying out yucata.de and brettspielwelt.de.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#185

Post by mcv »

_pastel wrote: post #147
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.

He's doing fine, if a bit lonely, because he can't yet afford to hire anyone to work on it together. Though he has an active online community helping him out.

The site had some stability issues when user numbers spiked a couple of weeks ago, but he says he can scale more easily now and isn't afraid if everybody on HN comes to check it out.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#186

Post by fragmede »

jtolmar wrote: post #169
pbhjpbhj wrote: 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…

> how to modify boardgames to play with friends via webcam It's easy to adapt roll-and-write games (the genre that Yahtzee belongs to). One player rolls the dice and puts them in front of their webcam, the rest mark their answers on private boards. You can each buy the game, or print off copies of the board, or draw them by hand, or take a picture and write on it in a photo editor. We've been playing a lot of Railroa…

With a clear tabletop, and a very carefully placed camera(s) under the table, my group found a bunch of card games to play, with very little change need. Took multiple video streams/apps/devices to work.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#187

Post by fragmede »

mariusz331 wrote: post #95
blakeburch wrote: post #84

Austin has a local board game Meetup group that's shifted entirely to Tabletop Simulator during this time. It's great and definitely maintains the best feeling of playing a physical board game. I'm surprised that the author didn't mention the hundreds of games that you can download for free in the Steam Workshop as mods. Not all of them work flawlessly, so you have to test things out beforehand. However, the almost u…

This is awesome and gave me a lot of ideas! I'd love it if you checked out this app we're building to play social/board games over video chat. There aren't as many options as Tabletop Simulator but it may still be a good fit for your meetups: https://www.cyberspaces.app

One feature in tabletop simulator is that it is literally a simulator of a tabletop - which means that the simulated tabletop can be flipped over. At least, I think that’s supposed to be feature!

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#188

Post by distances »

Tomte wrote: post #8

Brettspielwelt is huge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrettspielWelt I can recommend it, although it's been years s8nce I've played there.

We tried this, but it just .. didn't work. Massive problems getting a game to launchable mode, and then it just doesn't launch. Games disappearing from the invite list, and joins not registering.

I can easily imagine that all could now be caused by overwhelming traffic, but the outcome was no game anyway.

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#189

Post by nkzednan »

I've been playing some games on https://www.yucata.de/en with friends - San Juan, Imhotep, Castles of Burgundy, Russian Railroads, Thurn and Taxis. Beware with Yucata that if you start a game with more than 2 people, you cannot resign and if you start a different game, it makes you take your turn in other games first. We also use Tabletopia https://tabletopia.com/games - Terra Mystica - one person needs to buy Tabletopia.

For more places to play boardgames online see https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/wiki/play_online as well as https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/2/d/1nwZkqIoIkkUakCvj...

Re: How to play board games online with your friends

#190

Post by amiga_500 »

astura wrote: post #162
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…

Tabletop Simulator (mentioned in TFA) is ideal for that, it can play most if not all of those. We've played Monopoly, Sorry, The Game of Life, Uno, Clue, and Catan as well as your standard card games (hearts, rummy, etc.). We've got a couple "classics" queued up for this weekend too. The first game was getting used to the controls but it was very smooth sailing after that. It's basically a "sandbox" gave that can sup…

Can you give me a brief description of how to play Catan on this?

I have a harder problem than just playing against friends. My wife and I, and another couple, all want to play Catan together. I don't want to sit in a different room to my wife.

I was considering just using a webcam here and at my friends, having two boards setup and both doing the same moves, so we can all "see" what is going on, and one side looking after the deck, the other the dice.

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