Take Your Games Online
The pandemic has shut down a lot of in person gaming, but fortunately places like Board Game Arena, Tabletopia, Table Top Simulator and online casino games at the PowerPlay website offer options. Gamers can also try browser based and app-based games.
One of the hottest free browser games these days is Wordle. This surprisingly engaging game asks players to guess a daily five letter word using process-of-elimination clues.
Board Game Arena offers a large selection of modern board games such as Pandemic, 7 Wonders, Viticulture, Parks and Fluxx. To play, you just log into the site with your browser. One of the nice things about Board Game Arena is that the rules are built into the system; the software will not allow you to make mistakes or illegal moves. Board Game Arena has both free and paid options. The free accounts offer a selection of the 419 games on the paid edition.
PowerPlay.Com offers table games such as poker, blackjack and roulette as well as online betting on all major sports. There also are live Vegas games such as Roulette, Casino Stud Poker, Casino Hold’em and James Bond’s favorite game, Baccarat. It’s all played with real money, though. On the other hand, you can win real money as well.
Tabletopia offers the chance to play more than 1,500 tabletop games in a virtual, physics driven environment. Unlike Board Game Arena, it does not have any rules enforcement. In many ways, Tabletopia is the closest to a live table game experience you can have in a virtual environment. Tabletopia works on Windows and Macs, and runs in most modern desktop web browsers. There are both paid and free versions of Tabletopia.
Table Top Simulator is another virtual table games sandbox. You must purchase the base software from Steam, but from there, gamers have access to more than three thousand “mods.” Mods are user-created games that can be played through the Table Top Simulator interface. Some of the mods are original games, but more are fan-created versions of real board and card games. This makes Table Top Simulator a bit controversial, since it allows people to play games without royalties being paid to the designers or publishers. It’s a bit of Wild West there and the quality of the games varies.
Source: miniaturewargaming.com
