The way me and my friends just turned into apes whilst playing games in the same room together is a feeling I miss.
We all still play online occasionally and still have fun but having the whole room drop laughing when someone hits a bullshit headshot is a hoot.
Board games have been a pretty effective way to recapture that feeling for me. When a single dice roll or card flip wrecks everyone’s plans and the whole table erupts at once, that’s a good time.
Video games, especially online, feel a little too disjointed these days – like our consciousness isn’t synced up the same way as it is when we all know we’re looking at the same thing at the same time and holding our breath.
What board games do you recommend?
Do you use voice chat with your friends playing online?
Checkout tabletop simulator there’s a ton of different games in the workshop.
I think my friend group has the most fun turning games we know into absurd games. Like in uno, we’d turn on all the bullshit settings on so people’s hands are being swapped left and right while other people are picking up 50 cards.
I’m partial to pretending I’m a less pos version of Steve Harvey on Family Feud. You get to ham it up when someone replies with an answer that obviously is going to have sexual answers.
Tabletop Simulator has like real board games too but I can’t get my friends to read any type of game rules so that’s when I give up and start doing stupid shit
And yeah we use discord to talk
Some of my favorites that have a higher frequency of “major upset” events. It really depends on your group, and how they like to play.
I stick with pretty quick and accessible games, because we frequently have to teach new people and I hate spending 3 hours on one playthrough of a huge game and then the newbie never gets a chance to try again with their new understanding.
Favorites:
- Wizard reliably makes our whole table lose their minds
- Love Letter takes sudden drastic turns and is so quick to play
- Bang! (the dice version) has as much treachery as it does chaos
- No Thanks! is an exercise in collective sadism
- Nanuk has perhaps the best “oh shiiiiiiiiiiiii-” moments with a combination of hidden information, bluffing, push-your-luck, pleading for help, backstabbing, and high-stakes card flips
Bluffing games:
- Coup
- Skull
- Cockroach Poker
Card games with sudden win conditions:
- Five Crowns
- Mahjong
- LLAMA
Asymmetric information games:
- Secret Hitler
- Codenames
- Mysterium Park
Not as frequent, but sometimes perfect for the right crowd:
- Three Dragon Ante
- Get Bit!
- GUBS
- Ca$h n Guns has foam guns that the whole table points at each other at once, Mexican Stand-off style
IMO it depends on the games. I’ve been playing co-op games with cousins, and you can get that same feeling. Like, everybody fighting together to take down a boss in Don’t Starve Together.
I have only gotten the apes feeling playing Helldivers II when I’m with 4 other people who pull through the entire missions with me, regardless of we win or lose on the extreme difficulty.
It’s the sudden bullshit that catches you off guard that has your sides hurting. A few days ago, we were holding off bugs, the transport started countdown “bro, get on the ship!” “It’s too late for me” “Bro you got 14 seconds!” “There’s no other way” just as a 500kg crushes his body and blows up the charger a step behind him . “Bro, you had to sprint 3 meters!” “It was the only way” “Guys poor one out for liberty.”
Got my kids into halo LAN.
The only thing missing is enough players for a good infection or pirates. Just a big gutted my oldest is into mountain dew.
Hahaha, can’t win em all :)
I had a job where we’d play Unreal Tournament at lunch and it was hilarious to hear them shouting at each other over the cubicle walls.
I am being physically attacked.
deedeedeedeedeedeedeedee
HEADSHOT
I miss LAN parties… Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, CS, Diablo, Alien vs Predator 2, Quake and the successors of those games. Good times. Online is nice and all, but nothing compares to playing the night away with friends in one room
i had some lan parties a few years ago at my apartment. best time of my life, everyone would come over and play something
Seriously.
I went to a party last year where we brought gaming laptops/steam decks to play online games together. It was really cool and recaptured the magic.
AVP2, nice. That’s one most people don’t mention.
I played that a few times with friends/cow-orkers late at night in an office where I used to work. I scared the hell out of one guy when I just walked over to his office when he was playing as a marine. He was so keyed up thinking about sneaky aliens and it was so dark that he didn’t see me coming. I wasn’t even trying to scare him, just walking over to talk to him.
Let’s see:
- WoW back when I had friends that played and a decent guild
- Playing pretty much every co op game with my best friend that we could find.
- Trying to beat the last level of Halo at 3am while having way too many energy drinks and one of us always managing to fuck something up while driving the warthog
- Playing Crota’s End raid in Destiny 1 blind with my friends when it came out and trying to get through the maze with the lamps
- That summer me and my girlfriend were both unemployed and we played hours and hours of Dungeon Defenders
Everyone either has kids now or travels too much or just isn’t interested in playing anymore. It’s sad those days are probably forever over for me now. Maybe once we’re all in nursing homes there will be a resurgence in lan parties, instead of bingo for our generation.
Get kids and play halo and other old games with them. I bet the feeling will be similar, yet different. Sharing the games you played in your youth, reliving the moments and creating new ones.
Plus you can kick their asses if you don’t tell them about the game’s secrets. I used to play Mario Kart with my young niece and nephew on my brother’s old SNES. They loved it but they had no idea about the power-sliding so I could beat them at will. They also never grasped that when you’re leading the race the players behind you get better pickups.
I’m not a monster - I would sometimes let them win when the crying got too annoying.
“Get kids”…
Mine was Goldeneye. LAN parties weren’t a thing when i was a kid really. Now get off my fucking lawn.
Oddjob, knives only in aztec
Sorry
In high school, took a networking class, the teacher of said class was the district’s IT specialist. Somehow our school accounts in that class has admin access to the entire network, which allowed me to do shit like install Counter-Strike across every machine on the network. There was always a gane going after that, and even some teachers were joining in. One of them asked me to get Diablo installed too but unfortunately, that game actually checked the CD-Key even for LAN so it couldn’t be played the same way as CS and I wasn’t going to use mine for it lol.
Maybe 2002 2003 my friend and I invited one of the lonelier kids from highschool to my friends house for an overnight gaming night. Turns out the lonely kid has an og Xbox and a dreamcast.
End up playing Marvel vs. Capcom for a few hours then completely beating halo!
One of my fondest memory’s.
UT99 for me. Diablo II for others.
Brought UT04 a few months ago for $2.99.
Still amazing.
My neighbors and I had a LAN set up, and we played this regularly. It was awesome.
UT3 was so smooth and fast, scaled so good 😁
Our friends dad was a network guy and hooked us up with a switch and about 200’ of cable. I had a pickup truck, so I was in charge of gathering the extra tvs. We’d have 20 people in my buddy’s basement having a blast.
Literally me getting all my friends around with laptops to play halo CE at 15fps, the one friend even powered through using only a trackpad. Legend.
What is preventing you from organising that again?
I’m still having LAN parties at +30. The only thing that changed is the frequency and the games.
We are really into Pummel Party at the moment.
Friends don’t want to, making new friends isn’t easy for some of us
Yep, two on second shift. Another on regular but everyone got families and kids with little time.
Rare is the day when we get everyone together and it mostly just ends up drinking and doing some bullshit like who’s the most similar to each character on The Man From Earth but can’t decide so have to assign an alt for everyone and pull up a spreadsheet lol.
After a couple games of Um, Actually.
And even then, that was only 3 people out of the old group of ~10. Lost half of them to republicans and their dumb shit from being young turning into dumb shit as adults lol.
It’s just not the same…
We do too. Now it’s catered with delicious smoked meats and kegs of beer instead of frozen pizza and mountain dew.
And now the times are changin’,
Look at everything that’s come and gone,
Sometimes when I play that old six-string,
I think about you, wonder what went wrong
A wise man once said, “life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone.”
For me it was team fortress and counter strike at my first office job.
My very first job was working for an airline reservation company. The company was on the East Coast, but we were in Denver, so we stopped getting many calls after 7 or 8PM. So we did what any reasonable group of people would do in that situation. We installed Warcraft 2 on our computers and got paid to LAN. The game even had a pause function, which we had to use on the off chance we got a phone call.
Second. Sniping that damn scout midair as he concjumps the moat in 2fort.
I vividly remember being over at a friend of mine, who for the first time had a members account on RuneScape and then we started doing level 1 clue scrolls on his account. We loved that game and from the point of becoming member the possibilities seemed so endless. Wasted far too much time on it ever since. Glad I don’t anymore. occasionally watch Limpwurt, a dutch youtuber, do incredible things with that game.
