Board gaming is a pretty social hobby to have. Aside from the inclusion of solo modes, the vast majority of board games require at least one person to play with. But back in 2020, (God, was that five years ago now?) we found our social circles severely restricted. During that time, I was living with a guy who wasn’t that into board games, so I wasn’t getting a huge amount onto the table. It took a couple of years for us to get the confidence to be back out in our gaming groups and friendly local game stores, and for me, I had a pretty good routine of gaming going for a good while.
Sadly though, I was hit by a double whammy of gameus interruptus. Firstly I changed jobs, meaning I couldn’t attend the same game group on a Monday anymore since I would be in London overnight. Secondly, my FLGS closed on Thursdays, which was the day my game group gathered. It was a real bummer and most of the reason my physical gaming this year is lower than the last couple.
However, there is still plenty of ways which we could play games with our friends from a distance. These don’t necessarily replace the gaming experience in person, but it’s still pretty fun.
Board Game Apps.
The smart phone and Steam were godsends during the pandemic, because you were able to play a board game very easily with either a bot or a friend also connected to the same game. Terraforming Mars, Sagrada, Wingspan, Lords of Waterdeep and even Pandemic all have digital implementation on Steam or your mobile app store which can let you play the game. Some people will say apps will slow the buying of board games, but I disagree with that. I’m more likely to spend 40-60 quid on a board game I know I like after spending a fiver on the app than take that kind of gamble based on nothing.
Online Simulators
If you want a connection to a massive library of games, there are several online options that give you access to everything you could possibly want. Board Game Area is an excellent option for a fully scripted experience, where you will click the option you want to take on your turn, and the game will deal with all the admin. This is great and have the option to take turn based games, where you play your turn, put the game down and walk away, waiting for an email telling you it’s your move again. It also helps that BGA is now owned by Asmodee, meaning they have access to a lot of modern games.
Tabletopia is much more like playing a board game yourself, where you can pick up and move the pieces, gather the resources, and occasionally make an illegal move. For me, this is my preferred way of playing a digital game, because it’s most like playing a physical game, but without the clearing of the game afterwards.
Tabletop Simulator is the in-between where you’ll take your turns, do the admin, but depending on the game you’re playing, the developer may have included some scripting to set up between rounds, or clear the board state.
For all three of these options, you have to rely on the publisher putting their game on there, but particularly with Board Game Arena and Tabletopia, these libraries are always getting updated and new games added.
Remote Plays
This is the most expensive of the options, both in money and time, but I think it’s the one that I want to keep doing as long as possible. In this option, you and a buddy set your game up in your own houses and take turns as you normally would. However, each turn is recorded and sent to the other, and both players will update their board state following each turn.
The limitation here is obviously that you need to each have your own copy of the game, which can be expensive, but if you happen to have them anyway, might as well! Also, not every game would work for this.
I’ve managed to play three games in this way, and all of them worked incredibly well. The first was Great Western Trail, which is a deck building, rondel game about transporting cattle across America. The board state is equal to both players, and the market is open, so if one person controls the market of cows, the other player can just copy as they need to. Because their own deck is hidden from each player, you don’t need to keep track of the other player unless you want to confirm points at the end of the game, but otherwise, the information is all out there. The second game was My Island, the tile placement legacy game. The gameplay is pretty straightforward, one player flips a card, and then everyone places the tile on the card on their board. When I played this, my friend and I took turns controlling the deck, and to speed things up, we would flip over five cards at once, sending six videos at a time, flipping cards at the end of each one, and showing the tile placement. It meant we could track when we met milestones as part of the scoring, and award points accordingly. Finally, the most recent experiment – Vantage. Vantage actually works incredibly well for this kind of play. This is a game that has players land on a planet and explore around to complete a mission, spreading out across the world, taking on skill challenges and managing the rolls to minimise any issues. My buddy and I are currently playing via Discord, but sending each other audio recordings of ourselves reading the passages from the game, describing our surroundings and our options. Because the game has us split up on the planet, thematically, this works incredibly well. We only need to track our own information anyway, and the game is designed so that it’s highly unlikely that players will end up with the same cards. I’m loving this kind of play and I hope I can try some more of Vantage.
Not every game is going to be suited for this kind of play though. Something like Carcassonne, for example, has a blind draw pile, which means players could end up drawing the same tile, and that would cause some confusion. Ticket to Ride has the same issue, in that, you might have the same route tickets and the proportions of train cards from the market would be weirdly split.
Basically, to make this work well, you need a lot of open information, or at least, things that can be tracked. Here are some games that I think would work for this style of game play, if you want to give it a go:
My Island
Rolling Realms (actually pretty much any roll and write would work here)
Here’s the thing, will this replace the joy of gathering with friends around the table? No, but it’s a pretty good stop gap for when you can’t just get together.
About the author:
You can find more of Luke’s ramblings about board games on his YouTube channel, The Game Imporium and as the host of the Bucket List Board Gamers Podcast.
