Daily discussion post: Games people play

[liv]

I'm thinking about play at the moment. For me games are an important part of how I socialize, and I'm working out how much of that translates to the social isolation world. Or, as some community leaders have been framing it, the world of social connection with physical distancing.

So let's talk about what we do for play, and what we're playing during the pandemic. Here are some prompt questions, but feel free to talk about anything game-related!

Are games part of the way you interact with children? Have you rediscovered games as an adult? Or are you playful in some other way that doesn't involve formal, structured games?

Do you play board and card games? Are they a special occasion thing, perhaps once a year when the family get together for Christmas, or a regular hobby? What's the best classic game in your opinion? Are you taking part in the contemporary board game revival? Do you have a favourite, or can you suggest a game that deserves more attention?

What about video games? Do you play phone games (and if so, are there any where you would like to connect with other players and add new friends)? PC games? Who's finally getting to that long queue of stuff you downloaded when it was on special offer? Console games? Multi player or single, classic, retro or modern, big tough tens of hours games or casual? Do you have kids who play video games, and do you approve or need to restrict how much and what they play?

Do you take part sports for fun and play? Or do you follow any sports? Which teams are you into?

I know there are lots of kinds of games I haven't listed, all the various forms of role-playing and improv games, gamified self-improvement stuff like Duolingo and HabitRPG, party games, you name it!

And if you feel like talking about it, do tell us how you've adapted your gaming and play to new circumstances. What works virtually, what needs adapting? What are you reminiscing about or watching in the archives when there are no live matches? What have you come back to after a break if you're one of the people spending more time indoors these days? What are you looking forward to playing when the world goes back to normal?

Comments

[luckyzukky]

my favorite game is definitely animal crossing: new leaf for the 3ds. i know it's generic of me since i'm a girl but i've never really been a gamer, it's just not my thing (besides obsessive minecraft playing for like 5 years straight lmao). ac:nl is really calming and chill though, it's really fun growing your town, talking to the villagers, decorating your character and home, etc. i haven't actually played it in a while but i started again yesterday because animal crossing: new horizons revived my interest in it (and i can't get ac:nh for a while now because of covid-19 so i'm trying to stay satisfied with ac:nl hehe).

i've also been playing this phone game called two dots for a while now, it's a really well designed puzzle game about connecting dots and i know that sounds super boring but it's addictive. i also play love nikki, but i tend to play it for a while and then take a long break because it's one of those stressful rpg games (but also a dress up game? it's cool though). i'm in the break phase right now lol

BOARD GAMES

[mothwing]

Great topic! I love games. I really enjoyed HabitRPG! Otherwise I played PC games a fair bit a decade ago (HL2, Portal, WoW, that sort of thing) and a lot of the classic point and click adventures in the nineties (Indiana Jones, Monkey Island, Loom). Other than that, no PC gaming for me.

When I was a teenager, I was into pen&paper RPGs, but after an incident with one of the players my group disbanded and I've never really gotten back into it again. I really, really loved it while we were still doing it, though.

It matters a lot to me if the game has got a good narrative or not. If the narrative is good, I'll give almost anything a go. That's also why I never play cardgames, even though Crocky loves them.

I didn't know there was a classic board game revival going on, but you could definitely say I'm taking part in it. My favourite game at the moment is Legends of Andor:

And we've played it a lot, including the fanmade campaigns, some of which are better than the originals. It's basically a table top RPG in wich a book is your GM. A bit like HeroQuest, another favourite. Forbidden Island is another good one, as is Evolution. Oh, and Mice and Mystic rules, too.
If anyone's got good board game recommendations, I'd be grateful.

I know that technically, there is a way to play D&D online, but so far, I haven't been brave enough. Whenever I didn't play with friends, I ended up in groups of all former hardcore players who were all men. That was in real life, though, so maybe it's different online... has anyone any experience with that?

[brumeier]

I'm a very mild-mannered person normally. But you get me into a game and I get cutthroat really fast. LOL! Lots of smack talk and a desire to win at all costs. I don't know why.

Sadly, the only games I play these days are on my phone. But when my son was young (he's 16 now and only into video games) we used to play board games, like Hi-Ho Cherry-O and Candyland, or card games like Go Spidey (Go Fish, only with Spiderman).

When we visit my aunt, though, he'll play Mexican Train with us, which is a dominoes game.

As a kid, I remember playing games all the time with my family. Scrabble, Risk, electronic Battleship, Monopoly, Guesstures, Scattergories, Life, Phase 10, dice, Rummy 500, Clue. My brother always got a new game for Christmas and the whole family would play it together. Ah, those were the days.

For a brief period of time my ex and I were having Family Game Night with my brother and his ex. Harry Potter Clue and Pirate's Dice, mostly. Those were fun.

I also dabbled in some tabletop gaming with my ex and his cousin. Mage Knights. He tried to get me into video games, but I'm not really any good at them. Atari I could do, with just the joystick and one button, but game controllers now are way too complicated. Just about the only one I could manage was Worms: Armageddon.

[annofowlshire]

In terms of social gaming, my husband and I are into LARPs (that’s how we met!), table top RPGs, and board games. These form a core for our social life—regularly having people over for table top games, board game nights, etc.

In the current circumstances, we’ve been playing board games together a bit, and LARPs are kind of out at the moment (although now I’m envisioning a LARP scenario that takes place through a group video call), but I’ve been nudging my husband to start a “table top” campaign using Roll d20 or similar. He’s keen, but has some other things to wrap up first.

I haven’t for the last decade or so been much into PC/console/mobile games, but we’re looking to try some “couch co-op” console games and he’s been doing some online PC games with friends.

We’d like to play games with our kiddo, but he’s only 23 months so he’s not quite ready to join us ^_^

Duolingo

[redbird]

I'm mostly, and deliberately, ignoring the gamified parts of Duolingo, at least for now. "Maintain your streak" is gamified talk for "do at least a little every day," and I want to keep that up, because it's easier to maintain that sort of habit than "I will do French at least four days a week" or the like.

I was looking at the "league promotion" bit when I first started, because I had a bunch of free time, and found the early lessons extremely easy. Right now, I'm doing intro French as much for listening practice as vocabulary. It's still at the point where I know most of the words before Duolingo "teaches" them to me, many via Spanish cognates or borrowed English (it has me practicing that the French for "weekend" is "week-end") or picked up from menus and signs in Montreal. But I can't go too fast right now, because typing can strain my left hand.

I suspect the gamification would work better for me if I was doing this with people, friends or in a class, or if all those "lingots" I earn for things like meeting my daily goal were usable for anything I remotely wanted.

[aome]

My teenage son enjoys games, and will sometimes ask for me to play something with him. We play Payday, Life, Sorry, Clue (if his sister is free to join us), Storming the Castle (Princess Bride game - if we get at least 1 more person, makes it more fun), the dice game Farkle and the card-based games Skip-Bo, Uno and Phase 10.

I especially love word-based games like "25 words or less" Taboo, Boggle, Pictionary and things like that, but since my son has a reading/writing learning disability that makes it harder, and some of those games require teams and thus more players than I am likely to have interested at any one time. My best friends used to host game nights and those were special favorites of mine when we played, but I haven't played any of those in ages.

As a teen I loved Pac Man/Ms Pac Man, Frogger and some of those other classics. My BIL just got a Nintendo Switch with some of the classic games but I haven't tried playing any of them.

Not hugely into sports - I run and do martial arts (and I am SO looking forward to going back to my martial arts classes when things calm down; training by myself sucks), but I did enjoy shooting basketballs with my son in the driveway, until our hoop was damaged in a storm last year. We also have a Wii but I haven't played that in awhile either; my favorite game there, hands down, was bowling.

For the past year or two, I've enjoyed playing "Word Cookies" on my phone - rearranging letters into new words - Yahtzee and a word category game called "Red Herring." Those are my main forms of daily play these days.

[aome]

Harry Potter Clue is so fun, with the way the board keeps shifting. I should suggest that the next time we play Clue, instead of just regular Clue.

Thankfully, my son (also 16) still enjoys old-fashioned board and card games and doesn't play video games at all. On the other hand, it makes it harder for him to fit in with peers, since they're all into gaming and he's not.

Re: Duolingo

[aome]

I hear you - it's much more fun and helpful to practice a language WITH someone. I'd offer to find some way to play online language games with you ... except I don't know any French beyond a bare handful of basic terms, lol. Anyone for German? Or want to learn Mandarin?

[liseuse]

I'm an only child and board games weren't really a huge part of my childhood, other than Scrabble. We played a lot of Scrabble. Mostly my mother and I played a lot of Rummy and Beggar My Neighbour (this game takes forever if you're playing it with two people by the way), and occasional games of dominoes. Currently a friend and I are playing Words With Friends to while away some of the time.

I love Monopoly but because my mother hated it I very rarely got to play. Eventually we reached an agreement that we could play it every other Christmas.

I have played video games about three times in my entire life. Unsurprisingly I am very bad. We didn't have a tv for most of the time I was a child/early teen, so I first encountered video games when I went to university. I do currently have Round The World in 80 Days in my Steam account and this might be the thing that gets me to actually make it around the world!

Board games have definitely become more of a thing in my adult life. I live alone so don't own that many of them - I have a copy of Ticket To Ride and Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, both of which are a lot of fun. But friends own lots of them and it's always fun playing them when I visit.

I got the following link via an email newsletter last week which seems helpful for people who enjoy playing games but can't right now! - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Dwn5ZUX3WiCnod6xDboTRzZ7fUol6IWSwPs4hXLDxz4/htmlview?sle=true - it's a spreadsheet of various games and how to play them with other people/solo.

[shipperslist]

Back when I was a kid, we used to play cards and board games. It’s something I sometimes miss because board games with just two players don’t work that well. We have Carcassonne we sometimes play and I should introduce Mikado to my kid at some point.

I got briefly addicted to Sims when I was pregnant with my kid but haven’t touched it since. Nowadays I mostly play words with friends and not much else.

[pensnest]

Monopoly was, when I was a child, a frustrating part of my life, as for some reason my little sister *always* won. More recently, my Beast taught himself two or three new computer languages by programming home versions of 'Cluedo' in them; this often involved him, aided by the machine, playing against me. I learned a great deal about how to play, and I don't think the computer ever beat me! But he's a World of Warcraft addict now, and Cluedos no more.

My daughter introduced me/us to more sophisticated board games, although I'm not a regular. One that turned up early on I now love: that is the delightfully simple Dixit. I love Dixit! A game that involves beautiful and very weird illustrations, and a simple method of keeping score, it only takes a couple of minutes to explain the concept and the rules, so anyone can enjoy it. Playing it with different people gets interesting variations, which makes for a lot of fun (on one memorable occasion, there was general agreement on which card meant 'Sterek'). It'd probably be good entertainment for a family or group of 3 or more stuck at home together.

Cards Against Humanity. I have played this for several years with my regular Camp Sparkle people, and we have made several of our own questions and answers based on our fandom and shared history. Excellent fun, though I suspect not for everyone.

Camp Sparkle also ran the "Add 5 Words Story" for several years, which made for some very bizarre fiction... it would actually work online. Hmm. Though it might be too scary for current circumstances—we got some *very* weird shit in those stories!

I like playing Pictionary with the family, but one Christmas a few years back we had Epic Fail. My husband and son made a pretty good team, my daughter and bro-in-law also did very well. My father-in-law and I got *nowhere*, because he could not even throw out random words to guess what my drawings were - and I'm really not bad at drawing - and when it was his turn to draw, the pencil would quiver above the paper until time ran out. Can't guess with no material… so we made no progress at all. Most frustrating!

On my phone, I have an epic collection of card games, mostly solitaire but some played against the computer, which constitute probably 80-90% of my phone use! It's called Card Shark, and I recommend the collection. I've discovered several new solitaire games in a range of difficulties.

On the whole, I'm not a great player of non-solitary games (I like my Killer Sudoku puzzles) so I'm not missing the gaming interaction.

Hurray for Two Dots

[jesse_the_k]

Oh, Two Dots is so soothing and challenging at the same time! While it encourages you to buy coins to extend play, it's also possible to play without spending a penny or connecting your social account.

[jesse_the_k]

Nifty resource, thank you very much.

Scrabble play was fierce in my house growing up. My mother kept scoresheets for decades! I've never played Words With Friends -- how does it differ from the Scrabble experience?

[liseuse]

I've been sending it to basically everyone I know as a sort of "hey, this might help!".

Scrabble was very fierce in mine as well. When I inherited the old Scrabble board I found years of slips of paper used as scoresheets. I also remember getting to uni and realising that we played by a very harsh set of House Rules and that yes, pluralising a word did count as a go! And no, you don't have to skip two turns to be allowed to exchange your tiles!

The playing experience of Words With Friends feels a lot like Scrabble. There are some differences in how much letters are worth and the distribution of the premium squares. But overall it feels like a nice relaxed game of Scrabble - it's helpful that it's via your phone so there is no one staring at you and tapping their fingertips as you agonise over where to put the F.

[jesse_the_k]

I grew up playing Scrabble and Charades with my family, Monopoly and Milles Bornes with my peers. When I left home I got sucked into a card playing vortex: Sheepshead and Euchre, Pinochle, Bid Whist, Hearts, Spades. The first two are Northern European games with elaborate specialized vocabulary (German or Danish, depending on who taught me) as well as novel card rank (J Q K A 10 9 8 7).

When I need soothing, I reach for super-simple games requiring repetitive motion and no thought whatsoever (no reading, for example: just color and shape cues). My first love was a Classic Daleks freeware on System 6 for my 512K Mac. Currently I play 2048 Hex on my iPad.

Playing with my dog is always soothing -- here's MyGuy playing that deep strategy game "stick."

https://vimeo.com/217412485 password is "bella"

[jesse_the_k]

Holy moly the no-plurals-rule is cruel. Some of my best plays have been with plurals bringing me into the outmost squares!

Sometimes to relax we'd play Speed Scrabble. We'd get two minutes per turn, which prevented any of us from swirling down into "must maximize points!" anxiety.

[liseuse]

I just thought that was how you played! And then we were playing at uni and I played a terrible word and someone asked why I didn't just shove the 's' onto the end of another one. I duly explained that you couldn't do that! It's against the rules! Reader, it is not against the rules. And yes reader, I did make my mother explain, to my housemates, that she had indeed created this rule and allowed me to believe it was an actual rule for my entire life.

I tend to assume I'm going to lose a game of Scrabble from the get go? I do not have a brain which is made for finding the most point-efficient turn. I like words and I end up looking for the nicest word, and not the one that scores a lot. My stepfather, however, isn't so hot with the words but that man has a verrrrry mathematical brain.

[jesse_the_k]

I'm glad that one of the liberations uni brought was clarity about the rules.

I share with you the delight of elegant word-play. It was illuminating playing with a friend who would routinely create four or five words each play, by making side-by-side words instead of intersections.

Our house rules are so lax in comparison.
- I've printed up a "permitted 2-letter words" cheat sheet that everyone can use
- If someone is willing to trade a tile, it's fine, with no turn penalties. (Say I have a great bingo if I only had an "E"; I ask the table whether anyone is willing to trade my, say, "U" for an "E.")

[liseuse]

It does mean that I still remain slightly unsure as to which are the actual rules and which are my mother's rules. I think I've just about sorted them in my head these days but there are moments where I pause and go "wait, hang on" and have to google.

I like those house rules!

We did used to have fun playing reverse!Scrabble when I was kid. Trying to find the words in words to remove from the board.

[tozka]

One thing I've done differently from my usual gaming habits is buy a new-release game the same week it came out (Animal Crossing). Usually I wait a few years to see if the price goes down, but I bought it early this time specifically because I wanted to feel connected to everyone online who already has it. Like, join in on the community while it's still new and excited!

(My copy isn't coming until Wednesday, boo.)

[kalium]

I guess my one big true game would be the original Petz run, which I still mod for - and I've been making some more lately. I've been playing for twenty years now, even though the series ended in... 2002, I think? It still has a very devoted fanbase.

And I'm breeding pokemon as usual, but I've been doing that for a while - trying to get perfect 6IV pokes takes time.

[readera]

I have been enjoying pokemon go and dots & co on my phone. They have done some updates for pokemon go that make it more playable so that is nice.

[althea_valara]

I'm a gamer - a good portion of my journal is talking about video games. There's two that take most of my gaming time:

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius - a mobile gacha game that has an excellent large cast of characters. If anybody wants to add me there, my ID is 965,432,229 and my game name is AltheaV. I really love the story in this game! Since it's a gacha game, it's free to play, with options to spend money if you'd like. My income is tiny right now, so I have not spent a single dime on the game, and yet I've done some of the hardest content there is.

Final Fantasy XIV - it's an MMORPG. I started playing in September and have been playing daily since. It also has an excellent story! I'm Althea Valara on the Coeurl server, Crystal data center.

I also like casual mobile games. I play the various Flow Free games daily; over 1000 days daily streak in the original version. I sometimes play Wordscapes on the weekends.

I've currently got a run of Final Fantasy V in the works for Esuna for Corona.

I was an avid board and card gamer when I was a kid. Lots of Monopoly and Canasta with my younger sister. I miss those days. I rarely play those games now. Occasionally my mom and I will play Canasta or Cribbage, but that's rare.

I went to a board game group when I was in my 20s, and picked up some good games there that I otherwise would have never heard of. Ricochet Robot is a good workout for the brain that tests your spatial acilities, and the game can be played solo. Acquire is a game of corporations; you buy stock and merge companies. I also remember playing Citadels but it's been so long since I've played that I've forgotten most of the game. I do remember being good at it, though!

I used to watch Wil Wheaton's TableTop YouTube series, and saw a lot of neat games I'd love to play some day. The one that interested me the most is Castle Panic. It's cool because it's a collaborative game: everyone works together to defend the castle from invaders. You all win if you're successful, and all lose if all the castle walls get knocked down.

Finally: I've been passing around a link to Cheap Ass Games. They've always had low-priced board games, but they offer many of their classic games for FREE on their site. Just download and print! I can recommend Devil Bunny Needs a Ham.

[aome]

Your doggo (and your Guy) are adorable. :D

Re: BOARD GAMES

[petrea_mitchell]

I've been playing Pathfinder Society games online for a couple years, and I know all the same tools are used for D&D. There are two basic approaches:

Play-by-post (PbP): GM and players post to a thread on a forum, a blog, or a Discord channel. Maps and such are usually handled through Google Slides.

Virtual tabletop (VTT): The game happens in real-time in a browser-based app like Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds. Both provide a shared map and text chat. Usually this is supplemented with voice chat through Discord.

Warhorn carries listings for many VTT games; just search for the game system and a location of "online".

As for gender balance, online PFS does skew very male, matching the overall PFS demographics. I don't know what you'd get with, say, the D&D Adventurers' League.