2021 the year of Virtual Board Gaming

So, this is the end of 2021, a year where we expected to move away from COVID-19 and hoped we would never again experience the strictures imposed by necessity the previous year. Boy were we all wrong!

2021 felt more like an unwanted and unappreciated sequel to a disaster movie of sorts. COVID never really went away, we just learned to wing it as best we could, donning masks and bathing our hands with copious amounts of hand sanitizer. All along restrictions came and went, some frowned upon, others accepted if only to regain some of the basic freedoms we lost.

In this scenario, keeping afloat mentally was challenging. Virtual get togethers became acceptable at first only to be shunned by a few of mostly weary friends and acquaintances who had had enough of all the social distancing. Yet, we must admit that technology did offer some respite from the social drought we had to endure.

As for board games the situation was dismal at best. A hobby which thrives on social interaction is bound to suffer on account of the very evident lack thereof. This meant that once again, as in my case, I had to turn to digital adaptations and virtual arenas where to engage with the titles I love. I also realized that doing so was even more daunting than I initially anticipated.

For one, I had to deal with the lag that comes with taking turns and following through with feedback. Indeed, there are some excellent websites such as boardgamearena.com and desktop applications like Tabletopia which are aimed at precisely this kind of interactions, but they all depend on the commitment of players to engage with the virtual board games. From my experience most players can be non-committal or bail out with not so much as an explanation. This phenomenon is common in other more mainstream games like League of Legends, where players are penalized for abandoning a game halfway through. This I think is only fair, given that repeat abandonment can dishearten even the most loyal players in the long term.

There is no cure for the above, mainly because the very impersonal nature of the medium makes the premise of abandoning a game quite acceptable for the casual gamer. Some gaming companies have taken ulterior measures to deal with the matter. Rather than penalizing a player they automatically engage a bot to replace the AFK (Away From Keyboard) player so as not to disrupt the game. While on the surface the solution may appear more congenial it is still sub-optimal at best. Most bots used in these games cannot truly replace the complexity and/or quirkiness of the human player.

Regardless, at times playing versus bots feels acceptable. As I see it, a bot will always be there, will wait patiently if I happen to pause a session and I can pick up from where I left off once I get back to the game. Human players may not be so amenable. Furthermore, most gaming bots come with various difficulty levels which allows you to finetune the difficulty to match your current skill level.

There is also an upside to playing digital adaptations, and that is that you get to play the board game at what is normally a fraction of the cost. Take for instance the game Scythe, currently the game retails at €66.99 + shipping on amazon.de so I would expect it to cost me around €80. Buying the digital adaptation during a sale on Steam set me back only €12 and I could get playing at a significantly lower price point. In the case of Scythe, which is a rather heavy game to learn, the digital adaptation allowed me to better appreciate the game’s mechanism and to determine whether I would really like to own a copy. As it turned out, I did not really warm up to the game, so at the end of the day I saved close on to €68 (if I got my shipping approximation right).

Yet to be fair even if I own the physical game, a low cost digital adaptation can offer a lot of gratification when you cannot sit down at a table to play with live players. In this vein I acquired a number of such titles (mostly during sales on Steam) and in most instances the adaptations were very well made and brought the games themselves to life. I need to mentioned the digital adaptations of Wingspan, Splendor, Tokaido and especially Raiders of the North Sea as being some of the best adaptations I have come across. All offer online, multiplayer options and very decent bots with varying difficulty levels, should you fancy a game without the hassle of chasing online players to complete their turns.

If it were to depend on me, I would be playing physical board games often, but the truth is that this has not been possible for quite some time. Maybe going forward the situation will change, and we will go back to playing more physical games and less digital adaptations, but for the time being the latter will have to do.