Family Game Night: Digital Edition
On our first "family game night", we wound up playing Scythe digitally, each on our own computer. We were tired and nobody wanted to pick a game or put effort into it, so I picked Scythe because I'd been dying to play, but digital because we'd already all taken our leave, and the table was covered with junk. It wound up being a bust because each playing on our own allowed certain players to spend more time doing other things and multitasking, such that we'd sometimes wait literally 30-40 minutes for them to complete a turn that normally takes a few seconds. After hours of frustration, we ended up abandoning the game only a few rounds in.
Last time, we played Pantone, which was fun-esque and had minimal setup. I think it works better with more players, having recently played it with more.
This time we decided to try and play pass-and-play digital Eight Minute Empires, on the Switch. It was nice in that the digital version has some nice animations, some good hinting that can't be easily done in a physical board game (like the subtle highlighting of who has control of each region and continent, and the constant update of everyone's scores including points from commodities), and playing pass-and-play meant that we could still sit together in a shared space and play. There were still some issues with the other two players paying equal attention to their phones as to the game, but I think I'm going to have to learn to just cope with that. (At least it's better than when we watch a movie together and they spend so much time staring at their phones that I have to recap anything visual that happened on the screen that might have been important.) Overall, we had fun. I'd kind of hoped for more buy-in for the idea and more engagement from the participants, but you do what you can.
Eight Minute Empires is itself a really fun game that essentially pares territory control games like Risk down to their core, giving you a satisfying game that plays (not in eight minutes usually, but) in about fifteen minutes. It's intended to be something you can play multiple times in a row. It does get a bit samey after a few plays, but the digital version comes with a bunch of maps to allow you to mix it up a bit. The pass-and-play gameplay was fine, although the initial game setup took a minute or two to work out, and I do wish they allowed you to use multiple controllers if you have them so you didn't have to physically pass the controller around.
All in all it worked out fairly well, though, and I could see getting board games on the switch being a good way to play locally while getting the bonuses of computer-controlled hinting and scoring and eliminating setup and teardown. The big drawback is that it fundamentally doesn't work for games where some part of your game board is secret (like your hand of train cards in Ticket to Ride). I've heard that the PlayStation 4 version of Ticket to Ride allows you to use the PS4 companion app so that each player's hand of cards can be displayed on their phone. I haven't tried that yet to see how it works (but Jackbox Games does similar each-player-uses-their-phone integration to good effect). I feel like augmented digital experiences can add a lot to in-person gaming.