My friends are, for the most part, not board game nerds. They want to play commercially successful games like Trivial Pursuit, Balderdash, Uno, etc. We've had a real struggle to find a sensible way of playing them.
Eventually we just had one household point a webcam at a physical copy of Trivial Pursuit and everyone else play via Zoom, which was less than ideal.
It's basically a "sandbox" gave that can support, in theory, any board game.
I have a harder problem than just playing against friends. My wife and I, and another couple, all want to play Catan together. I don't want to sit in a different room to my wife.
I was considering just using a webcam here and at my friends, having two boards setup and both doing the same moves, so we can all "see" what is going on, and one side looking after the deck, the other the dice.
It's more of a tabletop style where you do everything yourself (collect resources, place settlements) and the pieces are synced between players.
Email me! cebraverde, at gmail.com
What was wrong with colonist.io ?
I’ve successfully setup a Discord session between two households where we all had laptops or desktops around a kitchen table with Tabletop Simulator on each, and a central TV for the video/audio and the overall game board shared “spectator mode”.
We played Ticket to Ride and a couple others (Sushi Go Party, and Spirit Island , which is like cooperative anti-Catan). It worked out well but definitely took some practice to get the right mix of software, and it helped that TTS was on sale.
They offer Chess, Checkers, Reversi, Go, Connect Four, and the like.