Long distance board games

How do you play board games long distance?

One person picks a game and makes it private. You get a link for the other seat, and you send it however you already talk: a message, an email, the call you are on. Your partner or friend opens it and sits down opposite you, and both screens connect to the same game, so a move made in one city shows in the other as it lands. Every board here seats two players, and each plays in a phone’s browser as well as on a laptop.

Nobody signs up. Nobody installs an app, and the other person does not need the same phone, the same store or the same anything as you. There is nothing to buy and nothing to ship, so the physical set can stay on the shelf at home. Everything runs in the browser, and every game here is available the moment the page loads. Voice is there if you want it, switched off until you ask for it, and the sound usually goes straight between the two of you. Chat is there too, for the words you would rather type. Or keep the call you are already on and put the game beside it.

Board games have always crossed distance

Some of these boards have had a long life on the road. Boards cut to the plan of the Royal Game of Ur have been found from Iraq as far as Sri Lanka, and in Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Cyprus and Crete. Four boards close to it lay in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Somebody scratched one into a stone gate guardian at the palace of Sargon II, a winged bull with a human head. One study dates its arrival in the Levant to about 1800 BC and in Egypt to about 1600 BC. The Jews of Kochi, in India, were still playing it as Aasha in the 1950s.

Nine men’s morris turns up in England, carved into the cloister seats at Canterbury, Gloucester, Norwich and Salisbury, and at Westminster Abbey. Nobody knows for certain who cut them. Somebody with time on a stone bench and company beside it is the guess.

Tafl travelled with the Norse. A wooden board for it was dug up at Ballinderry in Ireland in 1932, whalebone pieces turned up in Orkney, and in 1732 Carl Linnaeus wrote down the rules of tablut while travelling among the Lule Sámi. The boards are attested. The full rules are not, so every tafl table today, this one included, plays a reconstruction.

The post carried games across real distance long before screens. In 1804 a Dutch lieutenant-colonel in The Hague played chess by letter with one of his officers in Breda. A game by post between two countries can last several years. A link takes a second.

Simple rules, and a long way down

We learned board games from a local store, and the store sold the new ones: a box of hundreds of cards, a bag of plastic pieces, and a rulebook as thick as a phone book. Then we went looking for the classic games that belong to everybody, and found how much play there is in rules that fit on one page. It’s a small rulebook and a long way down.

Four in a Row takes a sentence to explain. Reversi takes two. Surakarta takes a minute, and then its loops make you work out where a capture comes from before you see it. Hnefatafl sets a king and his guard against nearly twice their number and never pretends the sides are equal. None of these asks for an evening of reading before the first move, and each still has something to teach after the tenth game.

What Reddit recommends, and what it costs

Ask on Reddit how to play board games long distance, as couples and old gaming groups keep doing, and the answers fall into three piles. Roll-and-write games, where each of you buys the same box and one of you calls out the roll or the card over the call. A tabletop simulator, where somebody installs a program or makes an account, and then sets the table up. Or your own board and a camera pointed at it, usually with one of you moving the pieces for both.

All three do the job, and all three ask for something before the first move: a box to buy, a program or an account to set up, or one person doing twice the work. This site asks for a link. A game that can be scratched into a stone bench needs almost nothing, and that is what makes it easy to send.

Built the other way round

We have tried to play board games online with friends, and it went the same way every time. Search for a site, close the pop-ups, create an account, find the friend, close more pop-ups, and only then set the board. Ten minutes in, the first piece moved.

This table runs the other way. When the urge to play arrives, one of you opens a game, the other opens the link, and the first move is the next thing that happens. There is no profile, no friends list and no password to agree on. Nothing is between the link and the game. Long distance gaming does not need a console, a download or an afternoon of setup.

Which board for which evening

A short call, or one of you is cooking: Four in a Row or reversi. Four in a Row is over within 42 moves, because that is how many holes the frame has, and reversi once its 60 empty squares are filled, or sooner. Both can be played while talking about something else.

A whole evening: chess, backgammon or the Royal Game of Ur. Backgammon and Ur are race games with dice, so luck keeps the weaker of you in it and a lead is never quite safe. The first of the three has no dice at all, which suits two people who want to know exactly who won.

A board neither of you knows, so nobody starts ahead: Surakarta, hnefatafl, Hex or the Game of the Amazons. Every one of them has its rules on its own page, and every one plays the computer, an opponent that is always free, if one of you wants to try it before sending the link.

When one of you has to stop

Time zones end games early. If you’re six hours apart, somebody always has to go to bed first. A game here waits 48 hours after the last move, so it can be finished the next evening, or the one after. After that the table is cleared and the game is gone, so a match that matters wants a move every other day. Each game page keeps a short list of the games your browser is still in, and you step back in from there.

That list lives on the device that made or joined the game, because there are no accounts and so nothing to sync. A game started on a laptop will not appear on your phone. Send yourself the link and it will. For the same reason nothing here pings the other person when it is their turn: tell them on the channel you already share.

When you are in the same place after all, the same games play on one screen, two people taking turns on one device. And when there is no second player at all, every board here plays the computer, which is also a way to help somebody learn the rules before a real game.