Board Games Online
Two websites come to mind for this section. The first is Tabletopia where you can reconstruct and play classic Tabletop Board Games in a virtual sandbox setting and play with people online. The embedded link gives you access to the online website. A sister programme (not sure if I should call it that) is also available on Steam under the title Tabletop Simulator if you primarily do gaming through that medium.
The second, and one I am more intimately familiar with is called Board Games Arena, or BGA from here on out. It’s more traditional Board Games brought to life online which you can play against anyone from around the world at any time. I first came across this website via a Discord Server I am in and after playing a wide variety of different games, three stand out as my favourites:
- L.L.A.M.A. where the goal is to clear your selection of colourful cards or score as few points as possible in each round until someone concedes 40 Points.
- Skull where the goal is to convince your opponents that you can find more Flower Discs than the next person… And then prove it before hitting Skulls and losing your place in the Game. The last player standing or the first to win two bids claims victory.
- Can’t Stop where you must push your luck and race to claim three columns. Success and Failure is all down to the throw of dice!
If you were to look through my history of games played on BGA, you might notice that I have played games similar to these three, but for me, I just find this list more fun and easy to grasp than others.
There is also a third website that I would fit into this box that I cannot for the life of me remember the name of… The premise starts with two teams being formed and a Captain elected who must go radio silent for the whole game. Both teams are confronted with a grid of words that are colour coded. The captains are able to see the colours of all the words and must describe to their team which ones they should target. Some of them are Neutral and pass control of the board to the other team when hit. And one contacts an Assassin which automatically hands victory to the opposing team if hit at any point. If anyone is able to identify the name of it, I’d appreciate it, and I’ll happily update this post accordingly.
The final places I would like to shout out as ways you can game online are Armor Games and Kongregate. They both use a substitute for the Flash Player so that players can access a library of Flash Games they have accumulated over the years and new ones that still get produced to higher standards. I am vaguely aware of so many websites that hosted Flash Games that I could almost make a whole Curious Aspie about the history of online Flash Game Websites and try and figure out where most of them are now. Let me know if you’d be interested in that as an idea.
Those last two websites definitely keep Flash Games as a concept alive and thriving. But if you join me later at 8 PM, I’ll tell you about two other platforms who do the same thing, but better, and how I wish certain other Flash Games were part of this trend. If you’ll excuse me, I have my own Christmas Dinner to indulge in. Happy Christmas from the Aspie behind The ADog Blog!
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