Moving Online

Due to the lockdown we’re unable to gather in the UK for at least a few more weeks (and because of my Multiple Sclerosis it’ll probably be at least another couple of months in my case). As I’m sure is true for most of you too, that means no Games Night at my house for a while.

Games Night is a weekly meeting of friends, almost all of whom have been colleagues at my old job (either during 2001-2005 or 2011-2020 or both). It’s been running from the moment I got a place to live up here - initially using a camping table and camping chairs while I camped inside a rental house waiting for The Wife to work out her notice period down south and move up to join me with all our stuff.

It’s not every week, with work travel, holidays, moving house and kids it’s been about 60% of the weeks over the last few years, but I love it every week it’s on and miss it every week it’s not.

And now there’s over three months without one. So it was one of the first things to set up in the brave new world of online gaming.

I’ve owned an iPad for a long time - I initially got it to play Pass and Play games with my mates from work when we travelled together, so I have a decent number of pass and play board games on it. So we’ve tried to use native apps as much as possible, with Google Hangouts for video chat.

My pass and play iPad games

Of course not all my friends have iPads so we’ve been trying to find games that work across iOS, Android and even Steam on the PC. Ones that have worked well are 7 Wonders, Race for the Galaxy, Carcassonne and Splendor. Tsuro was a real pain to set up friendships/games and we also tried Dominion.games in the browser last week and that worked pretty well too.

One thing I’ve totally failed to move online is my games design and playtesting. I’m trying to set up a weekly call with Paul though to help with that...