My board game playing has intensified due to COVID-19. Most of uptick has occurred online, though solo sessions have skyrocketed as well. My count for the past 30 days equals 54 plays. For perspective, considering the past 365 days reveals 354 plays. If I keep up the 54 plays every 30 days, I’ll manage just more than 650 games over the year. My gaming sessions had a tendency to disperse across a spectrum of games. A fan of change and variety, the cult of new often afflicts me. Mastering a game is fun, but the allure of exploring another game’s take on common mechanics regularly entice me. With online gaming, certain offerings have become the usual suspects. There’s a wide bounty of options, but my group doesn’t like paying for app versions of games, and does not always have the interest, or patience, to learn new games via the online medium. To some degree, the onus is shifted more to theme to pick up the rules, for not every online version of a game lends itself to rules explanation over a video chat.
This post will celebrate some of the games that have been my go-to options for social distancing. My next gaming post will focus on games I’ve been playing without the need for video conferencing.
Via Video Conferencing Software
Just One
Just One is easy to play. It’s a cooperative game, where you take turns trying to guess a word based on one-word clues provided by the other players. The other players write down clues in secret, compare their clues, and then you see only unique clues. That is, if two or more people wrote the same clue then you don’t see clues from those people; thus, the tension is trying to provide good clues that no one else will provide. When you’re the guesser, you see the clues that weren’t repeated and have one guess to say the word on the card.
Only one house needs to have the game, and, in theory, you could play without the game, simply generating a random noun for a person to guess. Whoever is up turns away from the screen, or turns the screen away from view, until it’s time to guess. Everyone else can draft their clues, compare via the video feed, and then not show struck words. If people are in the same house, they do not share with each what they wrote until they all have written down their words.
The last time we played, I messed up by not guessing, though I knew the answer. I was presented with Haunted and Spooky. I thought House and then Ghost and then Halloween. Given the options, I didn’t guess. However, Halloween was obviously the best guess given that if people had seen “House” they likely wouldn’t have written Haunted and Spooky. Maybe one person would have written “Haunted” to help me distinguish between words like “Home” and “House” in terms of what to guess, but receiving “Spooky” and “Haunted” in response to House would have been odd. Same idea with Ghost. Sure, a ghost is spooky and a ghost haunts, but would someone have written haunted rather than haunt or haunts and would people provide spooky and haunted for ghost? I don’t think so. Whereas, Halloween makes sense for Haunted and Spooky, fitting both words. After passing, my friends informed me that two of them had written candy, thus canceling that word. Candy, amusingly enough, would have also fit with house, but, again, I think Halloween would have made the most sense in terms of what associations would have come to mind upon seeing that word.
Welcome To
Welcome To is a flip-and-write, as in you flips cards and then each player selects a set of cards to use, marks a sheet accordingly, and then you flip more cards so the players can make another round of selections. The theme is that you’re populating a neighborhood by providing mailing addresses, building pools, constructing blocks by building fences, increasing real estate, and performing other similar neighborhood activities. They’ve rolled out alternate player sheets that incorporate ice cream cones, zombies, Christmas lights, among other variants, each with tweaked scoring rules. You can download and print the player sheets, and there is also a markable PDF version of the sheets available. So, all you need to do to play is point a camera feed at the flipped cards and go from there. I got tired of shuffling the deck, so I created an app that contains replicas of the cards, thus allowing me to share my tablet’s screen and conducting the flipping that way, which simplifies and expedites the process.
Pandemic
Pandemic requires no introduction for most gamers. In short, it’s a cooperative game where you combat four diseases while traveling the globe, in map format, treating infections of the diseases (glorified wording for removing cubes from the board) and curing the diseases by collecting and turning in cards. You lose by running out of player cards (a representation of time), suffering more than eight outbreaks, or being overwhelmed by a given disease (represented by running out of cubes that indicate infections of the disease). There’s no multiplayer app that works remotely, though you can hot seat the game (i.e., hand the device to people to have them conduct moves). However, with screen sharing, you can video chat, discuss moves, and have the person who hosts the game handle the app logistics. Given that a turn consists of 4 action points, it’s easy to discuss options as a team, and then have the host perform the actions. With an undo action available so long as hidden info hasn’t been revealed, you can play out options to see them on the board before committing.