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Comment by armagon | Hacker News Reader

Its strange to me that the article says that board games are booming during the pandemic.

I haven't been able to have a regular board game night in months :-( I tried online but didn't love it (I suppose I should try it some more); I wish I could see how to do it in person and maintain physical distance, but it looks doubtful.

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> Its strange to me that the article says that board games are booming during the pandemic.

Households of more than 1 member are probably looking for more things to do at home together.

Playing board games during the pandemic has finally allowed me to meet my roommates after like a year of living here. It's an introverted place.

Have a spouse and lots of kids ;-)

I also have some friends who entered into a quarantine pact. They don’t go around anyone else except each other. That way they can keep meeting up for board game night.

You should try out Tabletop Simulator for board games, or Roll20 for tabletop roleplaying like D&D. Both of these offer good options for online gaming in this space.

For purposes of an industry being 'booming' I'd say those are computer games, rather than tabletop games.

I beg to differ - RPG's played via roll2d0 Fantasy ground etc are not different to those played FTF.

Personally I don't like TTRPG as DnD precedes Computer based RPG's by decades and also TTRPG makes me think or more wargaming derived skirmish games 7tv or even Force on Force and so on.

An industry is booming if you're buying their products, and people use the same books to play D&D whether they're doing it in person or using a virtual tabletop. I admit this is more true for roleplaying games than board games, because you don't really need to buy a board game to play it on Tabletop Simulator, but Roll20 definitely sells a lot of WotC products, with their own value add (virtual tabletop integration) on top of it bumping the price a bit. Which arbitrary point you choose to start considering them to be computer games isn't important when it's the same industry either way.

As an aside, does anyone know where I could learn about Tabletop Simulator? I keep seeing it recommended, but when I got a copy I can't stand the UI. I feel like I'm always grabbing the wrong thing and accidentally losing pieces off the edge etc. I've tried playing the puzzle game and the Majong and both were terrible. I then tried a community version of Race for the Galaxy that nearly drove me crazy.

All I can say to you is that it takes a bit of patience to get good in TTS. I was very clumsy in the beginning. The community made games vary a lot in quality. You should look for mods that have a bit of scripting to help with setup and game admin, sometimes the scripts are broken, though. We do a voice call with all players during the game.

It has a tutorial function that works well enough. If you're playing with friends with mics you can just ask them if you don't know how to do a certain action.

Yeah, it seems insane to me that the whole thing is predicated on the idea that simulated physics is the best way to play a board-game online. (i guess this is the nature of current game engines, when you have a hammer everything lookslike a nail)

If you're used to navigating 3d space in video games or whatever you can probably pick it up but my gaming group is almost exclusively non-videogamers and the idea of getting them to play games through this thing is just a total non-starter.

Also it feels like a bit of a slap in the face to game designers that every player needs their own copy of TTS (~$20 each) yet designers -- whose wokr and IP is the pretty much the whole selling point -- will see none of that.

> it seems insane to me that the whole thing is predicated on the idea that simulated physics is the best way to play a board-game online

I disagree that's the approach of Tabletop Simulator. I mean, yes, it is a physics playground, but it is also much more. It includes some common actions like flipping, shuffling or drawing from a deck of cards. It includes grids to easily align game pieces. And most of all, it includes scripts which actually put some constraints on the "simulated physics" part, automating "maintenance" parts of a game, while also potentially enforcing game rules.

Yeah, I know that but it the physics and 3d first and the other stuff is optional -- the price of entry is being able to navigate a 3d world with pretty janky physics inside a computer. It's certainly a flexible toolset (though there are some real gotchas in there e.g. how bags work (they're decks so don't forget to shuffle them, you know, like you have to do with real bags)) but I find the approach of somethign like boardgamelab[1] more promising, particularly in terms of accessibility.

[1] https://boardgamelab.app

I'm lucky enough to have 5 other friends that decided we're the only people we will be seeing in person. None of us are in situations requiring interactions with other people (IE essential workers) and we're all in the same wavelength regarding hygiene.

Hijack. Has ANYONE found a way to play multiplayer Catan online? All the sites dont work it seems.

Tabletop Simulator is usually the go-to for basically any online board game.

TTS is a real last resort. It's the "Let's try hitting it with a hammer and see if that fixes it" of ways to play board games.

I have an ongoing Gloomhaven campaign inside TTS. 50% of every session is people wailing and yelling as stupid things are simulated that we don't care about. Oh you dropped that piece on the edge of a piece of cardboard so it fell over. Oh you put this token at the wrong angle so it doesn't count. Ugh.

When the same group of people play anything else we play it either in dedicated software or in https://boardgamearena.com/

Unfortunately BGA doesn't have Catan though its management have said they would cheerfully pay to offer Catan.

...Vassal?

https://colonist.io

I've played many times and it works great. Def worth having someone in your common circle that participates a lot to purchase the additional member pass (up to 4 players is free). The only thing is that it doesn't take into account extension pack rules for higher number of players but to me that's barely an issue let alone a deal breaker.

I played JSettlers a lot, ages ago. The (free) host moved around a bit, so would lose its critical mass of players. Looks like it lives on here: https://github.com/jdmonin/JSettlers2

I haven't tried colonist.io (cited in other reply), though from a brief peek it looks very polished. Am eager to try it.

Your parents have probably bought more board games this quarter than they did last decade though...

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