Are there any online games in nature that could be played over the internet family against family, engaging all ages and being interesting? The main feature here is that “team” players do not stare into their gadgets, but rather play with one device taking turns.
Shooters won’t do, I’m talking about family games which require thinking and playing collectively, ideally distributed. Not everyone sitting in a corner and blankly staring at their laptop waiting for their turn, but something displayed on a large TV, laying out fruit, juice, and wine, with both our family and our friends, all playing together?
An example from offline would be the game Pandemic, which we once borrowed from friends to play. It can be played by a group, and theoretically distributed. In it, “all cards are open”, everyone plays for themselves, but everyone either wins or loses together. Discussions, debates occur throughout, and it’s a game that could quite suitably be played through Skype. They’ve adapted it to consoles and tablets, but not to the web with multiplayer functionality.
It seems to me that Pandemic is quite fitting at the moment. It involves saving the world through joint effort.
For games where a player has a hand that shouldn’t be shown to others, personal phones could be used, but there is a risk that participants on each side might just be staring into their screens, which isn’t great.
Walking and shooting, as well as online quests, aren’t very suitable because of optional involvement. Playing all together as a single virtual player in a game like poker doesn’t work for the same reason.
Theoretically it’s like running five clients of an online game on one computer and switching between them as turns pass. Another family runs three clients. In the end, for the game server, there are seven players, but the fact that they use only two computers is a minor detail. But here’s the complexity, running five copies of an application on one machine is quite difficult. Let’s say, one opened in Chrome, another in Chrome’s Incognito mode, a third in Firefox, the fourth in its incognito mode, and the fifth in Safari. And spread these out across five screens. Register each under a personal account for each player. And switch between them using Ctrl-left-right. The other family does the same. But this is a very complicated scheme, just preparing for the game will take half an hour.
Let’s start collecting links – in this era of self-isolation, such things should somehow replace communication.
