Lockdown gaming update: what we're playing now
Way back in March when the world was young, we put together a handful of posts covering various approaches to remote gaming, to help people to find ways to carry on playing during the first Coronavirus lockdown.
Now that we’re back in our boxes for lockdown 2, we thought it might be interesting to find out what the Treehouse team are playing at the moment and how, to see which of our earlier ideas have stood the test of time. Come with us as we head out on a virtual tour of the Treehouse neighbourhood…
Ruth:
“To be honest Andy and I seem to have lost momentum with playing online in recent months. We had a lot of fun with our early experiments in gaming via Zoom, but as time has gone on we’ve tended just to chat (and, admittedly, drink!) when catching up with friends and family online.
Andy had a lot of fun taking part in a weekly game of Gloomhaven on Tabletop Simulator for a goodly part of lockdown 1. I dipped my toe in briefly but as a non-video gamer found the interface distracted too much from the game itself, which already gives you plenty to get to grips with! That didn’t prevent me coming away with a taste for some “real life” Gloomhaven though, so we’re now having a great time with the recently released Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, which is basically Gloomhaven light, perfect for those not quite ready to commit to investing £100+ in the full-sized version.
The game of Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 which we embarked on with Quizmaster Ben via Zoom at the start of lockdown 1 has been languishing a little, but maybe now we’re back indoors it’s time to dust off the Zoom set-up and continue preparations for the post-apocalypse.”
James:
“I’ve been indulging a little too deeply in some games… what starts out as a quick game with friends can easily end up as a gaming session that goes on well past 4am!
Xbox Game Pass (which you can get for £1 for the first month) gives you access to a large library of games from Microsoft and affiliates. A few choice favourites:
Slay the Spire: A flawless, Rogue-like deck builder
Gears of War: Tactics, essentially X-COM, set in the Gears of War universe
Sea of Thieves… more on this below!
I’ve also fallen down the MMORPG hole with the new release of WoW (Shadowlands) on the horizon and OSRS (Old School Runescape) running a special Trailblazer League event. Both are consuming huge swathes of time! Warhammer Total War II has also been a staple each week playing with a friend who now lives in London.
What brings it all together is the social nature of my time spent gaming. If I’m on my PC then 99% of the time I’m on Discord. Being able to jump into a conversation with a group of friends anytime of the day or night and playing whatever they are playing (or want to play) is just great!”
Matt:
“A bunch of us have been sailing the Sea of Thieves online! What began as visit of curiosity just before the start of the most recent lockdown quickly became a regular fallback for spending quality time with each other as our schedules *ahem* opened up.
Sea of Thieves is a videogame in which you can live out your pirate fantasies, and have we ever been living them. With 2, 3 or 4 players at a time you can crew successively larger ships to venture out into the deep blue, follow maps to buried treasure, solve riddles in pursuit of skeleton crews, or just opportunistically hunt other vessels and steal the fruits of their labour!
Rowan, having played before, took on the role of helmsman and guide (deliberately avoiding the word captain here, I’ll explain in a mo), giving a couple of us a grounding with which to spread the knowledge to what has eventually become a rotating crew of eight staff members!
We’ve found that Sea of Thieves offers many of the things that board gamers crave. It’s a substantial co-operative experience, but out on the seas it’s a dog-eat-dog world and alliances can be made in a flash by simply shouting across to another ship, but turn sour just as easily, leaving plenty of opportunities for trickery and negotiation. The co-operative element of making the most of the winds, raising the sails and anchor as a team and navigating through treacherous waters is incredibly robust. Quite naturally you settle yourself into a dynamic with your crewmates, but there’s so much to do to make a ship run just right that you can’t communicate all the details in the time available. That’s why I was being so particular about my wording earlier. We don’t have captains in our crew, because the way Sea of Thieves is designed makes alpha-gaming almost impossible. Much like in games like Gloomhaven, you make decisions as a group, because no one person can have all of the information at any one time.
There’s also a meditative quality to the game, although it might not seem like it from the description above. Being out on an open horizon, with no goal but to seek out opportunity where it hides with a group of friends to help you get there is something I think many of us have sorely missed during the isolation of lockdown. I’m no outdoorsman, but there’s a grounded quality to sailing off into the game’s beautiful sunsets and it’s what has helped turn a bunch of board gamers into a regular crew of salty sea dogs who (almost) all know their port from their starboard.
In a game about finding treasure it’s easy to get caught up in your ill-gotten gains, but when you can lose it all in one poorly-timed run-in with a boisterous galleon of teenagers you start to recognise that the reason we’re playing is the stories you have to tell afterward. We keep a record of every ship we’ve ever sailed as a group (examples below), and tell a little tale for the others to read, so that we can remember the time we were all locked inside, but escaped to the Sea of Thieves.”
Chella:
“We are still enjoying online games with friends and family, including improvised Just One using pen and paper; a little rough and ready homemade web version of Telestrations coded by a friend; a phone-based version of Cards Against Humanity called All Bad Cards, and most of the Jackbox games (repeat faves are Quiplash, Drawful, Fibbage and Trivia Murder Party). We've also been meeting our friends in Board Game Arena to play Hanabi which is nice because they live in Hamburg.
I'm lucky enough to be researching design fictions on my PhD so I've been able spend time playing some old and not so old text based adventures and narrative games (in the name of research!) on Steam and Itch.io, some of which I grabbed in the latter's 'Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality' a while back.
We've had a few breaks in play, but when we can get everyone together we continue roleplaying using Discord and Foundry Virtual Tabletop. We are about six sessions into the Enemy Within Campaign from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
We've also recently discovered that Airbnb now offers online experience tours, so we can finally realise our literal board game name location challenge: we've been saving two bottles of Jaipur IPA so that we can play Jaipur while drinking Jaipur, and now we can have a complete date night of that plus an online tour of Jaipur, India!”
Patrick:
“In our house we've been enjoying online card games like Magic: the Gathering Arena and Legends of Runeterra. They're not quite the same as sitting opposite an opponent to duke it out, but they both scratch a strategic itch! Magic in particular is in a good place right now, and it's great to just drop a game or two over the course of an afternoon.”
Then, last but very definitely not least… Ella:
“I’ve been making board games into drinking games (Cobra Paw) and I’m going to make a huge Battleships board to put drinks on in place of ships, then if your opponent hits your boat you neck whatever drink is on that square 🤪”
