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I was hoping this was going to be how to modify boardgames to play with friends via webcam. We played Monopoly, and had good success - one board, setup a ghost

I was hoping this was going to be how to modify boardgames to play with friends via webcam. We played Monopoly, and had good success - one board, setup a ghost player for the remote people. Remote people used parts of a set to keep track of their money and properties. Later several hours. >In my experience, Zoom is the most consistent service and works on almost any device. One person in your group will need a paid subscription if you want to host an event longer than 40 minutes. // We used meet.jit.si, it was free, good sound/video quality and long call time was no problem.

kickscondor 7y ago
My group has been doing a similar thing - except that video quality has been to unreliable for some of the more detailed boards (Troyes, Power Grid). We needed the ability to pinch and zoom the board. We’ve been using an app called iPhotoBot to take high res shots every few seconds. These get uploaded to Dropbox. Then there is a web server of a synced folder which builds a page of the images. Server-sent events are used to update the page. It’s kind of clunky to set up, but I can share my code if anyone is interested. I’m also curious if there are better ways to stream high quality photos.
- joemasilotti 7y ago
  Wow, that sounds pretty cool though! I wonder if there are any video services that offer pinch-to-zoom. An alternative would be to open a video chat in your browser. Then, on a Mac, you can zoom in with your touchpad. But I think zooming on the page in any browser should work, right?
  - antsar 7y ago
    Resolution might be a problem, since you're just looking more closely at the same pixelated full-board video you were already receiving. If the VC software was smart enough to detect your pinch action and send you a cropped feed at higher resolution from the source, that's a different story. Not sure if any existing tools do this.
joemasilotti 7y ago
I've never used that service, thanks for the advice! I would love to cancel my Zoom account if possible. I have a group of friends that is doing the "IRL" board game setup that you mentioned. They have a tripod and like three devices for household. I'll see if I can get more info on how they have it working.
iso1631 7y ago
"We played Monopoly, and had good success" Unlikely. What a tedious game
- C4stor 7y ago
  If they had fun, they had fun, and it's great. I don't like Monopoly, you may not like it, but please, let OP like it if he wants. What's even the point of your remark ? It's great that they had a great experience, and that's what's important !
- archon 7y ago
  Sometimes it's not about the game, it's about the people you're playing with and the conversation you have over the game.
  - SilasX 7y ago
    Yes, but Monopoly is probably worse (or not helpful) in that respect as well.
    - Loughla 7y ago
      Monopoly is great for fostering interaction! I mean, if your experience is anything like my family/friends, it certainly lets you know who in your circle is a cut-throat bastard who cheats at everything and deserves everything terrible that happens to them.
- joemasilotti 7y ago
  Apparently almost everyone is playing with the same "house rules" that make the game awful. Free parking is not a rule and just makes the game go longer. Not automatically putting up unpurchased properties for auction is also a big rule to miss.
  - dmoy 7y ago
    I've played monopoly strictly by the rules and it ends up being equally terrible as any house rules imo. Perhaps even worse, once you get someone who drops in with the hyper optimized bleed-everyone-to-death-with-no-hotels strategy. (Or worse, 2+ people with this strategy, because they it becomes a neverending game of trying to block all monopolies) I'll agree though, playing without the auction rule is super slow and boring. Maybe stock rules with infinite houses, I haven't tried that before.
hanniabu 7y ago
+1 for meet.jitsu
kerkeslager 7y ago
I'm kinda surprised by all the hate on Monopoly. It's a great game for learning. It teaches you to take risks early and slowly lower your risk tolerance over time to let your existing assets appreciate. It teaches you that the best values are at the extremes of real estate: you want to be either a luxury condo owner or a slum lord. It teaches you that capitalism isn't fair, because good strategy and hard work don't pay off if you don't get lucky. Come to think of it, maybe that last one is why HN doesn't like it. ;P
- quickthrowman 7y ago
  > Come to think of it, maybe that last one is why HN doesn't like it. ;P It’s demonstrably clear that the SV startup scene is a meritocracy where the best ideas get funded. Just ask Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes ;)
- vanattab 7y ago
  "It teaches you that the best values are at the extremes of real estate: you want to be either a luxury condo owner or a slum lord.” I thought the best properties in Monopoly where the opposite of this? It's my understanding that the best properties in Monopoly are orange followed by green then either red or yellow. Mostly the middle of the road properties. Orange is the best because it's approximately a 7 roll away from jail.
  - kyawzazaw 7y ago
    yes
  - kerkeslager 7y ago
    That's a pretty good hypothesis. I honestly don't know. The reason I've preferred purple and (dark) blue is that they only require two properties to have a monopoly, so you can get monopolies sooner. It might be confirmation bias on my part, but my memory is that when I get these monopolies early it often prevents people from developing the orange properties. But like I said, I honestly don't know. You're probably right that in the long run the orange properties would pay off the most based on being ~7 away from jail, but I wonder if games play out long enough for that to outweigh the effects of getting monopolies early.
JoeDaDude 7y ago
By now everybody knows there are alternatives to Monopoly, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAWzA09XGxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAWzA09XGxc
- re 7y ago
  I'm not familiar with many of the games in that video. But one of the things that makes Monopoly well-suited to remote playing is that there no information that needs to be kept secret, so it's reasonable to play with a physical board where remote people tell the board owner what moves to make on their behalf. Games like Catan where you maintain a hand of hidden cards require either some software to facilitate play, or else a lot of painstaking effort. It's not impossible though: one of my relatives played Euchre (a trick-taking card game) on a Zoom call with friends, where the dealer would show each person their cards one at a time, while everyone else turned away from their screen so that they couldn't see.
jtolmar 7y ago
> how to modify boardgames to play with friends via webcam It's easy to adapt roll-and-write games (the genre that Yahtzee belongs to). One player rolls the dice and puts them in front of their webcam, the rest mark their answers on private boards. You can each buy the game, or print off copies of the board, or draw them by hand, or take a picture and write on it in a photo editor. We've been playing a lot of Railroad Ink, which has a particularly easy board to draw by hand.
- fragmede 7y ago
  With a clear tabletop, and a very carefully placed camera(s) under the table, my group found a bunch of card games to play, with very little change need. Took multiple video streams/apps/devices to work.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  We tried Boggle, it was painful because we had a group at each webcam and one of the people had a really poor connection. The checking of words for uniqueness at the end of the round took forever. Still fun, but I wouldn't play again unless it was one webcam per person. YMMV.

kickscondor 7y ago

My group has been doing a similar thing - except that video quality has been to unreliable for some of the more detailed boards (Troyes, Power Grid). We needed the ability to pinch and zoom the board. We’ve been using an app called iPhotoBot to take high res shots every few seconds. These get uploaded to Dropbox. Then there is a web server of a synced folder which builds a page of the images. Server-sent events are used to update the page. It’s kind of clunky to set up, but I can share my code if anyone is interested. I’m also curious if there are better ways to stream high quality photos.

joemasilotti 7y ago
Wow, that sounds pretty cool though! I wonder if there are any video services that offer pinch-to-zoom. An alternative would be to open a video chat in your browser. Then, on a Mac, you can zoom in with your touchpad. But I think zooming on the page in any browser should work, right?
- antsar 7y ago
  Resolution might be a problem, since you're just looking more closely at the same pixelated full-board video you were already receiving. If the VC software was smart enough to detect your pinch action and send you a cropped feed at higher resolution from the source, that's a different story. Not sure if any existing tools do this.

joemasilotti 7y ago

I've never used that service, thanks for the advice! I would love to cancel my Zoom account if possible. I have a group of friends that is doing the "IRL" board game setup that you mentioned. They have a tripod and like three devices for household. I'll see if I can get more info on how they have it working.

iso1631 7y ago

"We played Monopoly, and had good success" Unlikely. What a tedious game

C4stor 7y ago
If they had fun, they had fun, and it's great. I don't like Monopoly, you may not like it, but please, let OP like it if he wants. What's even the point of your remark ? It's great that they had a great experience, and that's what's important !
archon 7y ago
Sometimes it's not about the game, it's about the people you're playing with and the conversation you have over the game.
- SilasX 7y ago
  Yes, but Monopoly is probably worse (or not helpful) in that respect as well.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    Monopoly is great for fostering interaction! I mean, if your experience is anything like my family/friends, it certainly lets you know who in your circle is a cut-throat bastard who cheats at everything and deserves everything terrible that happens to them.
joemasilotti 7y ago
Apparently almost everyone is playing with the same "house rules" that make the game awful. Free parking is not a rule and just makes the game go longer. Not automatically putting up unpurchased properties for auction is also a big rule to miss.
- dmoy 7y ago
  I've played monopoly strictly by the rules and it ends up being equally terrible as any house rules imo. Perhaps even worse, once you get someone who drops in with the hyper optimized bleed-everyone-to-death-with-no-hotels strategy. (Or worse, 2+ people with this strategy, because they it becomes a neverending game of trying to block all monopolies) I'll agree though, playing without the auction rule is super slow and boring. Maybe stock rules with infinite houses, I haven't tried that before.

hanniabu 7y ago

+1 for meet.jitsu

kerkeslager 7y ago

I'm kinda surprised by all the hate on Monopoly. It's a great game for learning. It teaches you to take risks early and slowly lower your risk tolerance over time to let your existing assets appreciate. It teaches you that the best values are at the extremes of real estate: you want to be either a luxury condo owner or a slum lord. It teaches you that capitalism isn't fair, because good strategy and hard work don't pay off if you don't get lucky. Come to think of it, maybe that last one is why HN doesn't like it. ;P

quickthrowman 7y ago
> Come to think of it, maybe that last one is why HN doesn't like it. ;P It’s demonstrably clear that the SV startup scene is a meritocracy where the best ideas get funded. Just ask Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes ;)
vanattab 7y ago
"It teaches you that the best values are at the extremes of real estate: you want to be either a luxury condo owner or a slum lord.” I thought the best properties in Monopoly where the opposite of this? It's my understanding that the best properties in Monopoly are orange followed by green then either red or yellow. Mostly the middle of the road properties. Orange is the best because it's approximately a 7 roll away from jail.
- kyawzazaw 7y ago
  yes
- kerkeslager 7y ago
  That's a pretty good hypothesis. I honestly don't know. The reason I've preferred purple and (dark) blue is that they only require two properties to have a monopoly, so you can get monopolies sooner. It might be confirmation bias on my part, but my memory is that when I get these monopolies early it often prevents people from developing the orange properties. But like I said, I honestly don't know. You're probably right that in the long run the orange properties would pay off the most based on being ~7 away from jail, but I wonder if games play out long enough for that to outweigh the effects of getting monopolies early.

JoeDaDude 7y ago

By now everybody knows there are alternatives to Monopoly, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAWzA09XGxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAWzA09XGxc

re 7y ago
I'm not familiar with many of the games in that video. But one of the things that makes Monopoly well-suited to remote playing is that there no information that needs to be kept secret, so it's reasonable to play with a physical board where remote people tell the board owner what moves to make on their behalf. Games like Catan where you maintain a hand of hidden cards require either some software to facilitate play, or else a lot of painstaking effort. It's not impossible though: one of my relatives played Euchre (a trick-taking card game) on a Zoom call with friends, where the dealer would show each person their cards one at a time, while everyone else turned away from their screen so that they couldn't see.

jtolmar 7y ago

> how to modify boardgames to play with friends via webcam It's easy to adapt roll-and-write games (the genre that Yahtzee belongs to). One player rolls the dice and puts them in front of their webcam, the rest mark their answers on private boards. You can each buy the game, or print off copies of the board, or draw them by hand, or take a picture and write on it in a photo editor. We've been playing a lot of Railroad Ink, which has a particularly easy board to draw by hand.

fragmede 7y ago
With a clear tabletop, and a very carefully placed camera(s) under the table, my group found a bunch of card games to play, with very little change need. Took multiple video streams/apps/devices to work.
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
We tried Boggle, it was painful because we had a group at each webcam and one of the people had a really poor connection. The checking of words for uniqueness at the end of the round took forever. Still fun, but I wouldn't play again unless it was one webcam per person. YMMV.