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Comment by ignu | Hacker News Reader

The problem with VASSAL and Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia is that... it's awkward to play a real time board game online.

There's a lot of down time while everyone else takes their turn. You have to set aside one to three hours to play uninterrupted. In real life, you have the benefit of hanging out with these people as you play.

However, I've become a huge fan of http://www.yucata.de/ and http://boardgamearena.com recently and not playing games in real time. Making one or two turns a day means there's no down time, and I can be much more flexible making my move(s) fit into my schedule.

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The main thing I've found about playing games not in real time is you are always able to min-max every move. Since I don't necessarily play every game to win (I try to win, but if I don't it's not a big deal) I enjoy the arbitrary time constraint of playing in real time. Makes things move along and gives games more of a lighthearted feel.

Also it's only three games, but I play Food Chain Magnate a lot and you can only play it online here: http://play.boardgamecore.net/

Hooray for FCM :)

You may try to min max everything, but you might not actually min max it. Not everyone is willing to build a model of the game with all its probabilities, and calculate the optimal solution. Many will just play their gut feeling for the probabilities. Others will build naive models. Others will just guess at a general strategy.

Right, it remains as much a social problem as a technical problem. If you worry your friends (or worse, you) might be prone to min/max more in asynchronous/delayed multiplayer situations, find social ways to encourage avoiding it.

(That's very much something that will be unique to your group dynamics, but little things like asking people to time how much they actively work on turn, or encouraging them to only do their turns during lunch breaks and from their mobile phone, can work for different sorts of people.)

FCM is one game that I prefer to play online. The physical version is a pain to play.

What is awkward with things like table top simulator is when they don't have a rules engine, so you don't get the benefit of learning edge cases through the game engine and don't get the bookeeping sped up, so you still have to watch everyone else take their turn to make sure they're not accidentally sneaking resources.

boardgamearena has the advantage of actually having rules engines so you can also relax more while playing knowing the engine is taking care of the rules freeing you up to making tactical mistakes instead of rule mistakes.

I totally agree. Brettspielwelt and Yucata also automate and ensure the gameplay according to the rules.

My friend used to play games on Tabletop Simulator. It's a good way to play with friends who don't live near you, but beyond that it's definitely a worse experience than playing board games in person. I don't have any experience playing with people that aren't friends, so I can't speak to the cheating aspect of it.

I too play with friends but it's not outright cheating that's an issue, it's usually more innocent than that, just edge cases or forgetting about less common rules, especially in more complex games like Eclipse or through the ages. It's easy to forget a rule that only applies in selective situations but which can have far reaching consequences.

It's nice to relax and have the engine take care of it, and by pushing things you can actually learn odd interactions you wouldn't have discovered through reading the rule-book.

I totally understand where you're coming from. I don't think I've played any games where it's made a large enough difference (in person or online).

I also love the idea that it will resolve things correctly right away instead of having to look at the rulebook every time you run into some crazy edge case or wording confusion.

Games on TTS can absolutely come with the rules built in via the exposed Lua interpreter. Mods can automate as much as they'd like.

Tabletop Simulator has an exposed Lua interpreter that any mod can take advantage of. The games can come with rules or not.

I much prefer the ruleless approach of TTS to be honest. It gives you that tactile sense of actually moving pieces around the board and interpreting the rules yourself that makes a board game feel like a board game. But with undo and instant setup and without the requirement that everyone be in the same place.

Not that it's a great tabletop game, but have you ever played a PC version of Monopoly? It's the most boring way to play an already incredibly boring game.

My only issue with Tabletop is that all the games I want to play with friends (and that at least one of us owns physically) keep getting DMCAed. That's fine in and of itself, but if a company is going to stop people who own their game from "pirating" it, it'd be nice if they'd make it available legitimately as DLC.

Use skype/facetime/hangouts to make it more fun. Then you can talk live kind of like in person

Seems like the awkwardness could be mitigated by using teleconferencing software of choice (audio or a/v)—even just a boring old phone teleconference—alongside the virtual tabletop software.

Doesn't get you the full in-persom experience, but enables more interaction alongside gameplay.

> There's a lot of down time while everyone else takes their turn.

Play more simultaneous-play games. Captain Sonar, Space Alert, Galaxy Truckers, and Sidereal Confluence are all really good games with basically no downtime.

Other games that use simultaneous action: 7 Wonders and one of my top 5 games, Race for the Galaxy.

Yes! Both of those are excellent.

Tell that to 4X Multiplayer Games or even Advance Squad Leader (ASL can take an hour a turn in real life)

Down time isn't always bad, especially if you have youtube open while you wait.

After playing a decent chunk of the original Squad Leader, ASL always seemed like "WW2 action for Star Fleet Battles fans".

Define every edge case and interaction and any amount of in-game time can stretch to fill all available real time... (See GDW's Fire in the East :)

I'm playing Tabletop Simulator in VR, it's pretty close to the real life board game experience... and you can resize yourself so you can walk around the pieces on the board

Also nice: https://m.brettspielwelt.de/

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