Online Board Games

[gnome]

It has a learning curve and you have to pay up front for it, but TableTop Simulator on Steam gives me a pretty good experience.

I have a few questions.

How big is the community of players?

Does the simulation incorporate the game rules, or does it just simulate the mechanics of the board and pieces, and it's up to the players to move them to the right spots and know the rules? Or something in-between?

Is it possible to play against bots if you don't find or feel like online play?

 

[Chanakya]

It has been a long time since I have been on the site, probably a year or two so not sure how much it has changed but I used to like quite a few of the games on pogo.com. Some are club only but there are quite a few decent games for free also. Or at least their used to be.....

I did check out pogo, but it didn't quite work for me. Maybe it used to be different earlier, I wouldn't know. They used to have Scrabble, apparently, and one of the best interfaces for Scrabble online --- or so I've been told --- but they don't any more. They do have some other word games that, at first try, didn't appeal. But I'll go back and try some more at leisure, maybe a more patient trial might bear results that a rushed check-through did not.

 

[Chanakya]

It has a learning curve and you have to pay up front for it, but TableTop Simulator on Steam gives me a pretty good experience.

I have a few questions.

How big is the community of players?

Does the simulation incorporate the game rules, or does it just simulate the mechanics of the board and pieces, and it's up to the players to move them to the right spots and know the rules? Or something in-between?

Is it possible to play against bots if you don't find or feel like online play?

Thanks for the reference. Speaking for myself, I'm okay with paying if the product's better than the sort of thing you get for free.

I haven't checked out the site yet, but I will. Meanwhile, I too am curious about the questions gnome raises. And I'd like to add one more of my own: Does this site let you create private tables/rooms, and play games with friends in a closed group?

 

[grunion]

I habituate boardgamearena.com. Browser only, no downloads. Free to play over 300 board games, from simple classics to newfangled complicated stuff. Real time or turn-based. If you join up let me know, let's play.

 

[grunion]

I haven't checked out the site yet, but I will. Meanwhile, I too am curious about the questions gnome raises. And I'd like to add one more of my own: Does this site let you create private tables/rooms, and play games with friends in a closed group?

yes

 

[grunion]

I have a few questions.

How big is the community of players?

Does the simulation incorporate the game rules, or does it just simulate the mechanics of the board and pieces, and it's up to the players to move them to the right spots and know the rules? Or something in-between?

Is it possible to play against bots if you don't find or feel like online play?

Re boardgamearena.com:
Hundreds from every country in the world
All rules hard coded, so no cheating or "sandbox" mode.
No bots as far as I know.
You can set up games with just friends, or limit opponents by level.

Some games can be initiated by paid users only but everyone can join.

Occassionally a player will "rage quit" rather than face losing (an issue on all gaming sites I have ever seen.) If they do they suffer Reputation points and may have an increasingly hard time getting into a game they like. But it's only temporary.

 

[Chanakya]

I habituate boardgamearena.com. Browser only, no downloads. Free to play over 300 board games, from simple classics to newfangled complicated stuff. Real time or turn-based. If you join up let me know, let's play.

You'd mentioned this site before this. I'd taken a quick look then, but none of the games were your regular board games that I'm familiar, so I made a mental note to check some games out later. As with most mental notes, it stayed undone.

Absolutely, I'll check the games out. And if I like what I see, and do sign up, then I'll be sure to either post here or PM you.

 

[gypsyjackson]

I have a few questions.

How big is the community of players?

TS seems to have a few thousand people online at any time:
https://steamcharts.com/app/286160

Does the simulation incorporate the game rules, or does it just simulate the mechanics of the board and pieces, and it's up to the players to move them to the right spots and know the rules? Or something in-between?

It’s been a while since I used it, but it used to be that that depended on how much effort the game inputter has put in. Most games seem to just be the pieces, as if someone has put the game on your real table. You have to find the rules and work out how to play. However some have scripted the legal moves, and some things like dice rolling or card turning are, I think, common. The strength of TS is the huge number of games, and the way you can look at something before you buy in real life. Loads of Kickstarter game designers now put their games up on TS first.

Is it possible to play against bots if you don't find or feel like online play?

It wasn’t. You could look for automa rules on line for a solo experience, but not AI.

I prefer BoardGameArena as a recent user, but it has its problems. Yesterday it didn’t tell me that my brother had joined a game (I was checking regularly, and it looked like he hadn’t), so after a while it kicked me out for thinking for too long. Trying to play solo is clunky, too - you have to tell it you want to start a two player game then delete one of the players.

But as grunion says, all the game rules are coded, and there’s a big community of people to point out if there are problems/bugs. There are some really good games on there, or at least some of my favourites. Sign up is free and I haven’t had any extra spam (but you will have to monitor your notifications carefully, because you can accidentally end up with an email every time another player does something!).

 

[Donal]

Sorry, just saw this:

I have a few questions.

How big is the community of players?

The community is rather large, depending o the game you play. It has a Discord server you can go looking for other players. and, your preferred game may also have a place where you can look for people who want to play on TTS.

Does the simulation incorporate the game rules, or does it just simulate the mechanics of the board and pieces, and it's up to the players to move them to the right spots and know the rules? Or something in-between?

Depends on the game, but generally somewhere in between. ITs pretty much all done by fans, so the quality and experience will lvary.

Is it possible to play against bots if you don't find or feel like online play?

You have to log into a server to play. I personally have not come across a game that uses bots.

 

[Chanakya]

Gave up on the browser scrabble thing, after a few tries, back when. Too clunky.

So yesterday I finally got over my (perhaps not quite rational) unwillingness to download apps and such on to my phone, and finally downloaded Scrabble, to play with a friend. And the experience was terrible. First, because to connect with others an email won't do, you must sign in with Facebook. And I don't Facebook, and I refuse to Facebook! So playing with my friend didn't work.

So I thought I'd just play a random game with whoever turns up. And I did play a game. Pretty good game. Won it too. But, God, it was crazy, with rewards popping up, and all kinds of weird graphics, and ads, and whatnot. (Now one or two ads I'm okay with, I mean they're not running these apps for charity, so sure, it's either pay or ads, I get that. But this was, like, all over the place!)

-----

So, are any of you aware of any phone-based games, or app based games, Scrabble I mean to say, that lets one get around both of these issues, or at least the first one if not the second?

1. Where you can play with a specific friend without having to acquire a facebook account.
This first, most importantly, and also, for a bonus,

2. Where the interface may be less ...loaded with all manner of stuff. (All I want is to play peacefully, and a virtual board that's as close to the original board as possible. And the original board does not have random things poppping up all around me!!)

 

[Vixen]

I play 'Seven Wonders Duel*' and 'King Domino' quite a lot on Board Game Arena, but only with people I know. It has chess, but that is a bit stressful, if you are both the competitive type.

*St Petersberg is quite similar, except nowhere near as good fun as SWD.

 

[grunion]

I play a lot of games on Board Game Arena as well. All games are in-browser and have no in-game ads, pop-ups or pay-to-play annoyances. You can play for free but a membership fee is reasonable and lets you initiate "premium" games (but anyone can play once a game is initiated.)

They don't have Scrabble but there are several other word games that might scratch that itch. 7 Wonders Duel and Kingdomino are great (you can finish a game in 10 minutes) but I mostly play Terra Mystica, Tapestry, and a few other heavier games. Vixen, PM me if you ever want to play.

 

[Chanakya]

Okay, I just found out --- in fact a child of ten pointed it out to me (I was trying to teach her how to do this, the tech part, she already knows how to play Scrabble on a board; and it was she who ended up teaching me things about the tech part that I was clueless about!) --- it isn't necessary to have a facebook account to play Scrabble online off of the official app. Although it is the facebook thing they highlight, maybe because facebook owns the thing, I don't know, but tucked some clicks away is a link that lets you connect all of the contacts on your phone to the app, so that if any of them is online you can invite them to play, and they you.

Of course you may not be comfortable doing this, but if you're able to get over that discomfort then you can --- for better or for worse, I don't know whether or not they do anything with that data that you wouldn't want them to --- get to play with whichever one/s of your contacts that you wanted to play with.

Cool app, actually. All those firecrackers bursting all around you, that's extremely distracting and irritating, but if you can get over that then the game experience itself is pretty close to actually sitting and playing on the board.