what Board games would work well for kids to play remotely?
March 22, 2020 4:34 PM Subscribe
Our ten year old likes gaming-he’s very excited about D&D recently, for instance-but recent events have put a halt to his activities. Late last week, he and a buddy played Battleship over FaceTime and it worked beautifully-for that game, not being in the same room is a feature, not a bug. What other games would you recommend? Assume relatively short attention spans and lots of opportunity for fourth grade trash talking. We have a ton of board games and are willing to by others. Prefer something they can play fairly independently while we try and WFH but also happy to facilitate or teach.
You can play D&D online. I just set my IRL (adult) friends up for this with Roll20. What's easiest for the Game Master (me, in my group) is to buy one of the pre-made modules or campaigns on Roll20 where all the prep work is done and the GM just has to read the story and reveal the rooms as they enter them.
If he's already familiar with official platform D&D Beyond (what me and my friends use for our character sheets) you can combine that with Roll20 using the Beyond20 browser extension. That makes it very, very easy to play online, even for people who have no familiarity with D&D. Just click the button on your character sheet, and it gets rolled on Roll20 automatically.
We found the built-in video chat for Roll20 kind of unreliable, so we do it in Google Hangouts. Then you can use a secondary device like a tablet for chatting, and just have the map & your character sheet open on the computer.
Of course you can just do the whole thing with Google Hangouts and IRL dice, if that's easiest. My players like maps though
posted by bradbane at 4:57 PM on March 22, 2020 [4 favorites]
If he's already familiar with official platform D&D Beyond (what me and my friends use for our character sheets) you can combine that with Roll20 using the Beyond20 browser extension. That makes it very, very easy to play online, even for people who have no familiarity with D&D. Just click the button on your character sheet, and it gets rolled on Roll20 automatically.
We found the built-in video chat for Roll20 kind of unreliable, so we do it in Google Hangouts. Then you can use a secondary device like a tablet for chatting, and just have the map & your character sheet open on the computer.
Of course you can just do the whole thing with Google Hangouts and IRL dice, if that's easiest. My players like maps though
posted by bradbane at 4:57 PM on March 22, 2020 [4 favorites]
D&D actually works pretty well if someone can DM; I just did a session with my own kid and some friends.
posted by tchemgrrl at 4:59 PM on March 22, 2020
posted by tchemgrrl at 4:59 PM on March 22, 2020
Oh and I agree that the in-game video stinks with Roll 20,.
posted by tchemgrrl at 5:00 PM on March 22, 2020
posted by tchemgrrl at 5:00 PM on March 22, 2020
We played Scattergories last night with another family. It worked fine.
posted by kerf at 5:25 PM on March 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by kerf at 5:25 PM on March 22, 2020 [1 favorite]
My son has been playing d&d over Skype, no problems.
posted by fimbulvetr at 5:45 PM on March 22, 2020
posted by fimbulvetr at 5:45 PM on March 22, 2020
Have you checked out tabletopia yet? Lots of games, and good UI. I set up a separate video chat with the other players, since tabletopia doesn't have video.
posted by rogerroger at 7:00 PM on March 22, 2020
posted by rogerroger at 7:00 PM on March 22, 2020
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posted by BlahLaLa at 4:53 PM on March 22, 2020 [1 favorite]