Wait long enough, and others may create what you want for you.

Took a bit of looking for me to find it, but, way back in 2008, I posted a brief blurb about how I was thinking of building a little web-based online game structure, to play certain sorts of board games with your friends.  As is all too common in my case, I didn't have a terribly grand vision, and, after some thinking about the challenges involved, decided it was too much work for the reward involved, and let it go.  Over the years since, a number of online tabletop gaming options have come to the fore, but there's always been some nit I could pick about any of them, be that the selection of games, or the icky pirate aftertaste of various game knock-off sites, or maybe the fiddlyness of dealing with simulated board game components with a keyboard-and-mouse combination (looking at you, Table Top Simulator and Tabletopia).  My vision of a simple interface handling a number of commercial-style games didn't look to be in the cards (so to speak), so I forgot it and moved on to other things.

That changed a couple of days ago when, in a fit of covid-19-lockdown-inspired boredom, I went browsing through Mixer streaming channels on my XBox One, and stumbled across a stream of a few people playing a game called Kingdomino together online.  Watching the stream, it was clear that it was something on an app or website that wasn't explicitly named (just displaying an odd cloud-like logo in its title bar), but it was definitely using the commercial artwork from the game... yet the interface also looked to be very straightforward, so somebody put some work into the game.  Curious, since the streamers never mentioned the app or site when they were playing, I did a little Google-ing, and shortly came up with a website called Board Game Arena.

Board Game Arena is an amazing thing, for all it's a bit overloaded with all the other covid-quarantined people around at the moment.  On a technical level, somebody obviously came up with the same sort of idea I had so very long ago, but ran with it rather than letting it go.  Interactions go back to their server, get stored, and results redistributed to all players (and spectators, one thing I didn't even consider back in the day), which allows for reasonably real-time play (enforced by timers, another thing I never considered) and turns-per-day play as well.

Working our way out from the minutiae of game-state management, they dared dream and build on a far grander scale than I ever considered, allowing for who-knows-how-many thousands or millions of players, with poor behavior reined in by a reputation system, and with per-game rankings of the various players based on how they perform.  They already have 175 games on their site, including some I would call "heavy hitters" from the commercial world... and all the commercial games that are present are there with the express permission of the publishers, so they're generally built with the actual art assets of the original games, and usually have links to the PDF of the rulebooks, among other aids for people who need a brush-up or haven't learned the game yet... and the state-storing nature of the system lets them build tutorials for players to go through, if they wish.

Even the inevitable "premium account" system is fairly benign, compared to what I've seen elsewhere... basically, for all some of the games on the site are considered "premium", all that means is that a premium member has to start the game.  If you're fine playing with random people, that means you don't have to pony up for premium yourself unless you want to try to play something more obscure that hardly anybody else is looking to play.  If, on the other hand, you want to play "premium" games with just your friends, then one of you needs to have a premium account to start the game, and everybody else joins in afterwards.  Outside of that, premium just looks to give you some relatively-minor perks (like choosing the color of your pieces, for example)... and the cost is palatable at 4 euros per month, but even more so if you buy the annual subscription instead, at 50% of the regular cost.

So, yeah, I haven't found any urgent reason to upgrade to a paid subscription so far, since playing for free is quick and easy.  I'd suggest giving it a go if you're at all interested in board games... and of course, if you stick around, friend me up!  As always, I am 'delRhode' there as well.

Right, that does for the XBox 360 stuff

I put in a bit of time with Red Dead Redemption, played a couple of story missions, went to try my hand at hunting down a bounty, shot and skinned a rabbit on the way there... and it struck me.  Mechanically, the game has a lot of similarity with something like Far Cry 3, just remove the radio towers and exploration aspects and add horses (which, to the game's credit, are handled differently than your usual "vehicles" in these sorts of games).  Of the two games, I'd rather do Far Cry 3, but I purposely skipped over that game earlier, so I'm not going to keep pushing forward with this one.

The setting is probably the biggest thing I have against the game... it's not that I mind scrub-lands and cacti so much, but, even from the intro video, the willful ignorance and arrogant class and racial elitism on display just grate on my nerves.  If I ever did come back to this game, it would likely be to play as a total rat-bastard, plundering and pillaging at will, but that's nowhere near my current mindset, even in "just a game".

There was one bright spot worth mentioning, though.  On a whim, I went to a movie house, and was presented with a delightful little cartoon produced by the local ladies' temperance movement, supposedly.  The subject was a patent medicine purveyor and his wares, which were almost 100% things like morphine, cocaine, and laudanum.  I don't know if there was any significant attempt to copy the animation styles of the period, but the contents definitely didn't fit.  Once you've seen a man blast a load of tapeworms out of his ass, followed shortly by him manically humping a tree, that's not an image you'll soon forget.

So, what's next?  Well, I was intending to start in on my XBox One backlog... but I just caught wind that NieR:Automata, a game I have wishlisted over at Steam, is coming to Game Pass, so I expect I'll be taking this opportunity to try that out, along with a raft of other games I have mild interest in.  If I find anything of particular interest, I'll post about it here, but otherwise it'll likely be a while.