Why does nobody talk about how board game night went from trading pieces by hand to app companions | Board Game Geeks - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
Why does nobody talk about how board game night went from trading pieces by hand to app companions
Back in high school in Ohio around 2009, we played Agricola with the little cardboard chits and passed around the one calculator for scoring, and somebody always messed up a count and we argued for 20 minutes. Now half my table runs scoring apps and the companion app for stuff like Gloomhaven handles the monsters so we don't touch a deck of cards at all. I resisted for a long time because I liked the feel of the bits in my hands, but when my group moved to three players who all live 40 minutes apart in Columbus, the app let us keep a campaign going between meetups instead of restarting every session. Last month we pulled out an old copy of Catan and my buddy's kid asked where the screen was, which kind of sums it up. It is faster and fewer fights over math, I will give it that. Part of me misses the mess on the table, the pile of wooden cubes and the arguing. Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like the app takes a little of the shared table magic out of it?