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 subscription if you want to host an event longer than 40 minutes. //
We used meet.jit.si, it was free, good sound/video quality and long call time was no problem.
I mean, if your experience is anything like my family/friends, it certainly lets you know who in your circle is a cut-throat bastard who cheats at everything and deserves everything terrible that happens to them.
I don't like Monopoly, you may not like it, but please, let OP like it if he wants. What's even the point of your remark ? It's great that they had a great experience, and that's what's important !
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.
I've played monopoly strictly by the rules and it ends up being equally terrible as any house rules imo.
Perhaps even worse, once you get someone who drops in with the hyper optimized bleed-everyone-to-death-with-no-hotels strategy. (Or worse, 2+ people with this strategy, because they it becomes a neverending game of trying to block all monopolies)
I'll agree though, playing without the auction rule is super slow and boring.
Maybe stock rules with infinite houses, I haven't tried that before.
As others have mentioned, house rules often ruin any fun.
It is, by name, a game about being cutthroat towards other players and emphasizes that you optimize in the long-term purely for personal gain. This actually doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Even the ones that seem to be more selfish often end up losing because they only optimize for short-term games and make it where nobody will trade with them.
Point is that a lot of those house rules slow down the main driver for the game: forcing people to go bankrupt. The house rules often put money back into the economy, which prolongs bankruptcy. To a large degree, the faster you can speed up bankruptcy, the more fun it is.
One of my personal favorite additions to the game was the Speed Die included in some versions. In a pretty elegant way, it greatly speeds up both the property acquisition and bankruptcy phases of the game.
Also as others are pointing out, the fun a of a board game is 90% dictated by the people you are playing with. That's not to say Monopoly is inherently or intuitively conducive to keeping the experience enjoyable, but it also can't completely prevent you from having fun. As evidenced by plenty of people, myself included, having immense enjoyment from it with the right group.
Ha, kids like to pretend to be rich, it has a forced progression and not too much randomness, auctions are fun (when you don't have to worry about actual money).
Is there a specific element you don't like? For me money just isn't that fun (the original point of the game, I gather) so ... but it's still not a terrible game.
Principally it was the request of one of the kids, was easy to play via webcam, and all participants had a set (different sets, but we called properties by colour+number pair, eg Orange One; and normalised the currency before we started).
The kids want to play Risk next, but I've not worked out how to make that work smoothly. Probably very similar again: , and each person having their own dice (to improve the tactile aspect).
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 used to update the page.
It’s kind of clunky to set up, but I can share my code if anyone is interested. I’m also curious if there are better ways to stream high quality photos.
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.
I've never used that service, thanks for the advice! I would love to cancel my Zoom account if possible.
I have a group of friends that is doing the "IRL" board game setup that you mentioned. They have a tripod and like three devices for household. I'll see if I can get more info on how they have it working.
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
"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 from jail.
That's a pretty good hypothesis. I honestly don't know.
The reason I've preferred purple and (dark) blue is that they only require two properties to have a monopoly, so you can get monopolies sooner. It might be confirmation bias on my part, but my memory is that when I get these monopolies early it often prevents people from developing the orange properties. But like I said, I honestly don't know.
You're probably right that in the long run the orange properties would pay off the most based on being ~7 away from jail, but I wonder if games play out long enough for that to outweigh the effects of getting monopolies early.
I suspect that it depends on the play style of your opponents. A lot of people are too hesitant to trade in order to gain monopolies for multiple people early on. I've seen it play out this way with multiple parties not having monopoly and one party having one on Blue (or even purple in one case) and absolutely refusing to trade out of fear that it might help someone else.
You need to factor in frequency of landing and cost to build. Orange is in the sweetspot. IIRC, red gets landed on more often, but the extra $50/house makes it tough to build up. Green is crap on both accounts. Pink is less frequent but cheap to build. Light blue and purple are only good if you monopolize early and can drive a building shortage (get ready to be yelled at by anyone not intimately familiar with the rules). Boardwalk is mostly useful to tilt the balance in your favor on long games. (as you pass go and collect chance cards, $ in circulation go up over time, so it gets harder to bankrupt people)
The best property is the cheapest group of three you can acquire the quickest based on the rolls in your particular game, so you can buy up houses ASAP and lock up the housing stock for the rest of the game, thereby ensuring you will win, albeit very slowly.
Once you get 6 properties with 4 houses each, you control 75% of all houses.
This is especially true if you play strictly by the rules where you cannot buy a hotel without first having four houses - it's then impossible for anyone to surpass your edge by skipping straight to hotel.
It doesn't matter which group of three, so long as it's cheap enough to build out all the houses quickly.
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.
Most people play a modified version of the game, without the auctioning of property, and with additional money put into the game when landing on Free Parking. Most also play they game as children.
Without auctioning, and with the money from Free Parking, the game lasts longer, and is frustrating for the losing players -- particularly for children, who have to tolerate the gloating of the winning child.
It might be educational, but that doesn't make it fun.
IMO the version on the Nintendo Entertainment System (yes, the really old Nintendo) is the best Monopoly, because it plays by vanilla rules and takes care of all the bookkeeping, auction-running, and setup for you. Plays fast. Few enough buttons even non-gamers or kids new to gaming can keep up.
Plus I think you can play it multiplayer online with modern emulators, which is relevant to the current situation.
I wouldn't consider entirely replacing most board games with a video game version but for Monopoly I'd make an exception. Play the one on the NES.
[EDIT] a crucial factor might be that there's no hidden or secret information in Monopoly, so it converts to all-playing-on-one-screen better than a lot of board games would.
Monopoly poisoned the expectations of generations of people about what a board game is. It's terrible not just because it's a bad game, but because it keeps people out of the hobby.
I'm not familiar with many of the games in that video. But one of the things that makes Monopoly well-suited to remote playing is that there no information that needs to be kept secret, so it's reasonable to play with a physical board where remote people tell the board owner what moves to make on their behalf.
Games like Catan where you maintain a hand of hidden cards require either some software to facilitate play, or else a lot of painstaking effort. It's not impossible though: one of my relatives played Euchre (a trick-taking card game) on a Zoom call with friends, where the dealer would show each person their cards one at a time, while everyone else turned away from their screen so that they couldn't see.
> 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 Railroad Ink, which has a particularly easy board to draw by hand.
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.
We tried Boggle, it was painful because we had a group at each webcam and one of the people had a really poor connection. The checking of words for uniqueness at the end of the round took forever. Still fun, but I wouldn't play again unless it was one webcam per person. YMMV.
We've played a couple of games in both TTS and Tabletopia. Neither became a favourite.
Superficially they are indeed very similar, you're getting a 3D simulated world with the board game in it, and then a clumsy way to interact with that world.
We did not find (not sure if any exist) rules enforcement implementations for Tabeltopia. Every game we tried we had to understand and enforce any rules, and the physics engine is arguably an obstacle rather than assistance as it neatly allows you to drop cards where they can't go, flip cards you shouldn't see, resize counters or accidentally stack them when that's not useful....
Big upside to Tabletopia: It runs in browser. If a person in your group has a company laptop that's locked down to do Office and so on, chances are it can't run Steam (and so TTS isn't possible) but it can run Chrome and thus Tabletopia works.
Definitely the biggest contrast is to BGA. BGA is the place to go if you want rules enforcement and aren't happy to stick with one game you all enjoy. But you won't get any of the mechanical joy if that's important to you. If you actually enjoy making change with monopoly money, BGA discards that because their rules enforcement just turns the amount of money (cows, glory, mana, whatever) into a number instead. Little wooden cubes become small red squares on the screen that appear exactly where the designer put them, you can't balance them or line them up how you want, because that isn't part of the game rules.
Personally I am now spending several hours every single week on a variety of games at BGA and maybe one session of TTS Gloomhaven if we can face it.
To me video conferencing isn't essential. We usually run a Hangout for live games, but in practice you care mostly about the voices. It's satisfying to hear another player say "Aw, I wanted that" when you take away an option you suspected they wanted, and it's easy to say "Sorry, Jenny is screaming, back in five" and put the headset down compared to having to type all that with a child screaming.
After watching an attempt to make Scrabble work [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaXo_i3ktwM ], I was thinking what games could work via a webcam if all players have the game.
Thinking of games I've played recently, Dominion would work. Ticket to Ride wouldn't. On the Underground would, 1960 Making of a President wouldn't.
Normal Settlers wouldn't, but the junior version of Settlers would
The key thing is not drawing secret information from a shared pool. Dominion works as it's secret information from a non-secrete deck, which can be known by all players -- you just have to ensure to remove the right cards from play. If player A takes a Duchy, player B removes one Duchy from his set from play.
With Ticket To Ride there's no way to ensure that you don't get the same tickets on each side - secret information from a common limited source.
Normal Settlers would struggle with the soldier cards -- you can draw a soldier, but it could be roadbuilding or year of plenty. Junior settler has the same with coco cards, but those are played immediately so that works.
Obvioulsy open games, like Chess, Go, Backgammon, work. Games like Battleships and Guess Who, where there is secret information but no shared ppol would work too (ok you could both be guessing the same character in guess who, but that would be OK)
Dominion would indeed work with webcam, because everyone only shuffles their own cards, but you can only play with the cards that everyone has (if one player has an expansion and the others don't, you can't use it).
If all of your players already know how to play, I strongly recommend the official Dominion Online [0]! The base game is free, and the expansions are very affordable too ($1.95 for a month with half the expansions [the older ones], or $3.90 for all, no recurring charges, and only one player at the table needs to have bought them). Unfortunately it's not very intuitive as an introduction to the game because you don't get a good feel of where cards are coming from and going to, but once you know the game it's arguably better (because of the instant setup and shuffling, and automatic tracking of effects).
The ticket to ride app is only $8-9 depending on your platform. It's pretty easy to find other players and make an online game. We played a few games as a family with a meet.jit.si running in the background, it worked pretty good. If you assume the price of the game is the cost of the gas it would take to drive to someone's house, it evens out in the end.
Tried last Saturday, and it was completely unplayable.
I guess they were under too much load. It took us an hour to just start a session of Wizard, and then we never managed to actually play because it keep throwing us out and showing error messages.
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.
The biggest flaw with this one is the lack of an undo button.
Interacting with stacks of cards is sometimes weird, and the physics get wonky, especially with hex tiles that snap to the board, but still don't align properly.
It works better the less objects are involved.
Playing "Wingspan", putting a card below another with eggs on top is dangerous.
> In my experience, Zoom is the most consistent service and works on almost any device. One person in your group will need a paid subscription if you want to host an event longer than 40 minutes.
Have to disagree on this, Discord has been a FAR better solution for my group of friends and I with our online game nights. We tried Zoom, Discord, Google Meet/Hangouts, and Discord has, by far, been the best UI/UX/clarity/quality.
The one thing I like about Zoom above Discord is the ability to see people's faces. Discord doesn't have this, right? It's nice to use the mini-layout in Zoom and put it off to the side like the article suggests.
I'm still waiting for some guy on Twitter[0] who's working on his own game board simulator to release his 8-bit video conferencing solution. The pixelation gives the perfect feel when you're playing DnD online with friends during a pandemic.
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.
That's fair, I guess depending who you play with, some people may not have a Discord. You do have to have a Discord account, correct. All of my friends and I are already all together in a Discord server, so it makes sense, but if it was new people playing that could def add to the hurdle.
And yet... asking us to sign up for Board Game Arena and Discord is exactly what the weekly game night I've been involved with the last month did, and they have 8+ people every week. (For that matter, I asked the folks in my new D&D campaign to sign up with D&D Beyond and Discord, and that went fine as well.)
Haven’t seen anyone mention tabletop simulator (available on Steam). It won’t be for everyone. I play Magic the Gathering and board games with friends. Many other games are also available with no work. You can play almost any board game with a little elbow grease.
I spent a good portion of my day searching for this yesterday (everything looks very shady). What i really want is a self hosted option but i have not found anything yet.
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.
My friends and I have been loving TTS. $20 is a pretty good deal for a sandbox where all the heavy lifting has been done already so you can just have a good time.
Other things to point out: It's free and no signup is required by any of the game participants (just create a room, share link, and enter). If you have a good/bad experience, feel free to reach out: mariusz at cyberspaces dot app
Looks good. I'd love to know what stack you're building with and what you're learning.
After seeing the readastorytome.com Show HN [0] was using Phoenix LiveView I was considering building a similar app to play spades or 42 as an excuse to learn some things I've been wanting to learn for awhile.
Awesome! Building these sort of games is a lot of fun and I recommend it! We think there's a good opportunity right now for games over video chat: folks that are self-isolating need a way to connect with each other and if you provide a fun service for that I think it will be used.
We started off using what we knew best: Rails, React and the Twilio Video SDK. We'll introduce other technologies as they are needed to increase our velocity or enable us to build more rich game experiences.
Happy to chat more offline: mariusz at cyberspaces dot app
Hey. We're super sorry about that. We are using the Twilio Video SDK for video conferencing and one thing we check is that your browser is supported by the SDK before entering a game room. The messaging on the error screen you encountered isn't great and we'll work on improving it. The experience works best on desktop Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge. On mobile iOS it only works on Safari browser.
this is really awesome, would love an option to play the games without requiring cam/mic access (if friends are already bought into another tool like zoom), which could also may also allow more players (e.g. bigger teams for codenames)!
Thank you - really appreciate the feedback! Bigger codenames games get CRAZY and we understand the appeal and we want to be able to provide that experience too. We've been thinking about this problem a lot since many of our users play as couples (they share a screen) and they can't easily participate separately. We also understand the privacy issues and we'll be building an option to enter a game room with your audio/video defaulted to off.
How are you guys managing the video? Is it peer to peer or is it being routed and encoded in a server first?
Codenames needs at least four players to start, if it's p2p, have you noticed any lag or bandwidth problems?
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 switching video providers to one with an affordable server option to improve the larger game rooms experience though.
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.
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...
Yeah man, really impressed with your simple yet effective implementation. Played a quick game of Boggle with a work mate of mine to test it out. Worked quick and seamlessly! Can't wait to see what other games you get on there.
I just gave it a shot to play codenames and it worked great for us. Are there restrictions on the max number of participants per game at this time? I'm thinking this could be fun for a work happy hour.
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.)
I highly recommend people check out Dominion. Having played many years ago on isotropic and then less so when goko/makingfun took over, this implementation is pretty light and quick.
The games themselves go pretty fast, and there's enough expansions that every game shouldn't devolve into a solved format. (I say this as a casual player learning the new expansions). You get access to the base game for free, and the pricing model for the expansions is pretty fair in my opinion (~$5/month for all thirteen, ~$2.50/month for half). There's a matchmaker and custom games. Even bots for those who want to play solo.
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.
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.
Also, plug for my own site https://oneword.games. It's an implementation of Just One, the 2019 Spiel des Jahres winner. I built it a month ago just to play with my friends; now I'm getting hundreds of daily players and I can't figure out where they're even coming from =P
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.
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.
I know from the creator of Dominion Online[0] that he had to upgrade his servers since the start of the Corona crisis. Lots of new users, leading to all sorts of problems. He seems to have things under control now, though.
I've used boardgames arena, it's ok but has a very classic German web design feel -- horrible UX that acts like the user is a dummy for needing good UX.
Between this article and the comments, I'm bookmarking this page as a good list of these games. I'd be remiss if I didn't add my own humble attempt, a Boggle-like game to be played over screen share: https://wordgame.paulbutler.org/
Another addition that I've found really fun is Lords of Waterdeep. The board game version of it is a chore to play due to setup and how massive the board is. The digital version is way more fun as the board game is set up already for you, and not as daunting.
Lords of Waterdeep is available on Steam + iOS + Android - it's the exact same game on it them all. Cross platform gameplay works which is really amazing. AI also exists and isn't half bad.
Your non-computer using friends/partners can play on their tablets/phones along side friends who have gaming PCs.
I use an online shared spreadsheet (like EtherCalc[0], or Google Sheets) to play my turn-based combat boardgame[1] with friends during the covid19 quarantine lockdown.
I think it's a lot faster and easier than using roll20 or other online boardgaming platforms, requires no signup nor learning any new shortcut.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] thread>In my experience, Zoom is the most consistent service and works on almost any device. One person in your group will need a paid subscription if you want to host an event longer than 40 minutes. //
We used meet.jit.si, it was free, good sound/video quality and long call time was no problem.
Unlikely. What a tedious game
I mean, if your experience is anything like my family/friends, it certainly lets you know who in your circle is a cut-throat bastard who cheats at everything and deserves everything terrible that happens to them.
I don't like Monopoly, you may not like it, but please, let OP like it if he wants. What's even the point of your remark ? It's great that they had a great experience, and that's what's important !
Perhaps even worse, once you get someone who drops in with the hyper optimized bleed-everyone-to-death-with-no-hotels strategy. (Or worse, 2+ people with this strategy, because they it becomes a neverending game of trying to block all monopolies)
I'll agree though, playing without the auction rule is super slow and boring.
Maybe stock rules with infinite houses, I haven't tried that before.
Optimal is 10 seconds.
Keeps the energy high and you can finish a game in 15 minutes.
It is, by name, a game about being cutthroat towards other players and emphasizes that you optimize in the long-term purely for personal gain. This actually doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Even the ones that seem to be more selfish often end up losing because they only optimize for short-term games and make it where nobody will trade with them.
Point is that a lot of those house rules slow down the main driver for the game: forcing people to go bankrupt. The house rules often put money back into the economy, which prolongs bankruptcy. To a large degree, the faster you can speed up bankruptcy, the more fun it is.
One of my personal favorite additions to the game was the Speed Die included in some versions. In a pretty elegant way, it greatly speeds up both the property acquisition and bankruptcy phases of the game.
Also as others are pointing out, the fun a of a board game is 90% dictated by the people you are playing with. That's not to say Monopoly is inherently or intuitively conducive to keeping the experience enjoyable, but it also can't completely prevent you from having fun. As evidenced by plenty of people, myself included, having immense enjoyment from it with the right group.
Is there a specific element you don't like? For me money just isn't that fun (the original point of the game, I gather) so ... but it's still not a terrible game.
Principally it was the request of one of the kids, was easy to play via webcam, and all participants had a set (different sets, but we called properties by colour+number pair, eg Orange One; and normalised the currency before we started).
The kids want to play Risk next, but I've not worked out how to make that work smoothly. Probably very similar again: , and each person having their own dice (to improve the tactile aspect).
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 used to update the page.
It’s kind of clunky to set up, but I can share my code if anyone is interested. I’m also curious if there are better ways to stream high quality photos.
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?
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.
I have a group of friends that is doing the "IRL" board game setup that you mentioned. They have a tripod and like three devices for household. I'll see if I can get more info on how they have it working.
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
It’s demonstrably clear that the SV startup scene is a meritocracy where the best ideas get funded. Just ask Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes ;)
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 from jail.
The reason I've preferred purple and (dark) blue is that they only require two properties to have a monopoly, so you can get monopolies sooner. It might be confirmation bias on my part, but my memory is that when I get these monopolies early it often prevents people from developing the orange properties. But like I said, I honestly don't know.
You're probably right that in the long run the orange properties would pay off the most based on being ~7 away from jail, but I wonder if games play out long enough for that to outweigh the effects of getting monopolies early.
The results are inevitable at that point.
Once you get 6 properties with 4 houses each, you control 75% of all houses.
This is especially true if you play strictly by the rules where you cannot buy a hotel without first having four houses - it's then impossible for anyone to surpass your edge by skipping straight to hotel.
It doesn't matter which group of three, so long as it's cheap enough to build out all the houses quickly.
But yes, orange is best because of jail
Without auctioning, and with the money from Free Parking, the game lasts longer, and is frustrating for the losing players -- particularly for children, who have to tolerate the gloating of the winning child.
It might be educational, but that doesn't make it fun.
Plus I think you can play it multiplayer online with modern emulators, which is relevant to the current situation.
I wouldn't consider entirely replacing most board games with a video game version but for Monopoly I'd make an exception. Play the one on the NES.
[EDIT] a crucial factor might be that there's no hidden or secret information in Monopoly, so it converts to all-playing-on-one-screen better than a lot of board games would.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAWzA09XGxc
Games like Catan where you maintain a hand of hidden cards require either some software to facilitate play, or else a lot of painstaking effort. It's not impossible though: one of my relatives played Euchre (a trick-taking card game) on a Zoom call with friends, where the dealer would show each person their cards one at a time, while everyone else turned away from their screen so that they couldn't see.
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 Railroad Ink, which has a particularly easy board to draw by hand.
Superficially they are indeed very similar, you're getting a 3D simulated world with the board game in it, and then a clumsy way to interact with that world.
We did not find (not sure if any exist) rules enforcement implementations for Tabeltopia. Every game we tried we had to understand and enforce any rules, and the physics engine is arguably an obstacle rather than assistance as it neatly allows you to drop cards where they can't go, flip cards you shouldn't see, resize counters or accidentally stack them when that's not useful....
Big upside to Tabletopia: It runs in browser. If a person in your group has a company laptop that's locked down to do Office and so on, chances are it can't run Steam (and so TTS isn't possible) but it can run Chrome and thus Tabletopia works.
Definitely the biggest contrast is to BGA. BGA is the place to go if you want rules enforcement and aren't happy to stick with one game you all enjoy. But you won't get any of the mechanical joy if that's important to you. If you actually enjoy making change with monopoly money, BGA discards that because their rules enforcement just turns the amount of money (cows, glory, mana, whatever) into a number instead. Little wooden cubes become small red squares on the screen that appear exactly where the designer put them, you can't balance them or line them up how you want, because that isn't part of the game rules.
Personally I am now spending several hours every single week on a variety of games at BGA and maybe one session of TTS Gloomhaven if we can face it.
To me video conferencing isn't essential. We usually run a Hangout for live games, but in practice you care mostly about the voices. It's satisfying to hear another player say "Aw, I wanted that" when you take away an option you suspected they wanted, and it's easy to say "Sorry, Jenny is screaming, back in five" and put the headset down compared to having to type all that with a child screaming.
Thinking of games I've played recently, Dominion would work. Ticket to Ride wouldn't. On the Underground would, 1960 Making of a President wouldn't.
Normal Settlers wouldn't, but the junior version of Settlers would
The key thing is not drawing secret information from a shared pool. Dominion works as it's secret information from a non-secrete deck, which can be known by all players -- you just have to ensure to remove the right cards from play. If player A takes a Duchy, player B removes one Duchy from his set from play.
With Ticket To Ride there's no way to ensure that you don't get the same tickets on each side - secret information from a common limited source.
Normal Settlers would struggle with the soldier cards -- you can draw a soldier, but it could be roadbuilding or year of plenty. Junior settler has the same with coco cards, but those are played immediately so that works.
Obvioulsy open games, like Chess, Go, Backgammon, work. Games like Battleships and Guess Who, where there is secret information but no shared ppol would work too (ok you could both be guessing the same character in guess who, but that would be OK)
If all of your players already know how to play, I strongly recommend the official Dominion Online [0]! The base game is free, and the expansions are very affordable too ($1.95 for a month with half the expansions [the older ones], or $3.90 for all, no recurring charges, and only one player at the table needs to have bought them). Unfortunately it's not very intuitive as an introduction to the game because you don't get a good feel of where cards are coming from and going to, but once you know the game it's arguably better (because of the instant setup and shuffling, and automatic tracking of effects).
[0] https://dominion.games/
I can recommend it, although it's been years s8nce I've played there.
I guess they were under too much load. It took us an hour to just start a session of Wizard, and then we never managed to actually play because it keep throwing us out and showing error messages.
I can easily imagine that all could now be caused by overwhelming traffic, but the outcome was no game anyway.
Interacting with stacks of cards is sometimes weird, and the physics get wonky, especially with hex tiles that snap to the board, but still don't align properly.
It works better the less objects are involved.
Playing "Wingspan", putting a card below another with eggs on top is dangerous.
Don't even try to play "Dominant Species".
https://tech.bakkenbaeck.com/post/chessvision
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21613982
Have to disagree on this, Discord has been a FAR better solution for my group of friends and I with our online game nights. We tried Zoom, Discord, Google Meet/Hangouts, and Discord has, by far, been the best UI/UX/clarity/quality.
I'm still waiting for some guy on Twitter[0] who's working on his own game board simulator to release his 8-bit video conferencing solution. The pixelation gives the perfect feel when you're playing DnD online with friends during a pandemic.
[0] https://twitter.com/HunterLoftis/status/1245385563697545219
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.
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.
It's literally mentioned in the article?
https://truco.ba.net for truco or spanish card games
https://www.pokernow.club/ - Poker
https://www.trickstercards.com/ - including Spades, Bridge, Hearts
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!
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
After seeing the readastorytome.com Show HN [0] was using Phoenix LiveView I was considering building a similar app to play spades or 42 as an excuse to learn some things I've been wanting to learn for awhile.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22836940
We started off using what we knew best: Rails, React and the Twilio Video SDK. We'll introduce other technologies as they are needed to increase our velocity or enable us to build more rich game experiences.
Happy to chat more offline: mariusz at cyberspaces dot app
(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.)
Looks like a rough game. Why did you buy the last Cellar to end the game when you were behind?
The games themselves go pretty fast, and there's enough expansions that every game shouldn't devolve into a solved format. (I say this as a casual player learning the new expansions). You get access to the base game for free, and the pricing model for the expansions is pretty fair in my opinion (~$5/month for all thirteen, ~$2.50/month for half). There's a matchmaker and custom games. Even bots for those who want to play solo.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codenames_(board_game)
[1] https://www.horsepaste.com/
Also, plug for my own site https://oneword.games. It's an implementation of Just One, the 2019 Spiel des Jahres winner. I built it a month ago just to play with my friends; now I'm getting hundreds of daily players and I can't figure out where they're even coming from =P
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.
But yeah, it's got modules for wargames as well as cards and probably others. It's free, and most mods are too.
[0] https://dominion.games/
I was frustrated by the official online Catan and Colonist.io, so I made my own version.
But then we play a few games of Coup and all is good :)
https://acquire.tlstyer.com/ is a good implementation of Acquire
Lords of Waterdeep is available on Steam + iOS + Android - it's the exact same game on it them all. Cross platform gameplay works which is really amazing. AI also exists and isn't half bad.
Your non-computer using friends/partners can play on their tablets/phones along side friends who have gaming PCs.
I think it's a lot faster and easier than using roll20 or other online boardgaming platforms, requires no signup nor learning any new shortcut.
[0] https://ethercalc.net/ [1] https://www.tomcooks.com/projects/snipr/
https://beta.probability.nz/
The game can be daunting and long (~4 hours), but the gameplay is very cool!