Getting into the groove

For our weekly board games night this week we resorted to the tried and true Codenames, Hanabi and Istanbul implementations that we've used the last couple of weeks, partly because they worked well last time and we're not sick of them just yet, but also because we're still looking around for more diversity of free options that could work well for a large and changing group of people. What we've already tried can keep us rolling for a while, it's never actually about the game but about the people, after all, but a little something new every now and then is always good. Something that can support a lot of players, is free and isn't just Codenames again is our holy grail at the moment, but none of the options that we've tried so far have really hit the jackpot.

Tabletop Simulator seems to be the option that most people seem to swear by, but apart from the occasional really well-put-together game, most of the implementations just lack a level of user-friendliness to allow me to recommend it as an option. Yes, I could definitely get used to using it and hosting people via screenshare, but it's too fiddly for me to reasonably expect my friends to all use successfully, especially given that they'd all have to pay for the engine just to get started.

Tabletopia seems like a slightly better option, if only because the subscription model there allows me to buy an account that will allow my friends to play a pretty decent range of games without having to buy it themselves. It has a lot of the issues of TTS, but at least it's theoretically more accessible and has a really solid range of titles. Unfortunately, the web version seems to be pretty unreliable, and both it and the Steam versions are extremely resource intensive (even my relatively beefy laptop starts to chug a little). I think I'm likely to try this out with those friends that have Steam some time soon, but it's not going to provide a solution for the main games night as it stands currently.

Pretty much the same experience as the card game.

We had some good success with playing Innovation on Board Games Arena this week. I'd been pretty dubious about it given that Innovation is a relatively complex, information rich game, but the interface worked really well despite the limited screen real-estate, so well, in fact, that I think it's actually better than the card game version, and is certainly easier to teach. It probably helps that the art in the card game is nothing to write home about either. Sadly, Innovation isn't really the sort of game that most people really get the hang of in one play and it's definitely not a game for everyone, but I have a little more faith in the BGA interface now and am keen to try it out on an even more ambitious game. It says that it can support Keyflower, and if it actually can, that will be positively miraculous.

I find myself wishing for the IRC days, when folks ran many and varied chat bots that could facilitate all kinds of excellent games. It seems like there are an awful lot of discord bots out there and that most of them seem to be pretty useless on the whole, but I have been meaning to learn to program anyway, so if I'm not able to find something that works for us, perhaps trying to program a game playing python discord bot will become my big quarantine project...

Please, save me from this fate and recommend me something I can use to entertain my friends when Monday rolls around again. I'm a thirty year old man. If I try to learn something new my brainy might overheat as much as my computer does trying to play Village.