In a broader definition of a game (not just a
video game), I will mention
Pandemic. It's not only to make a pun in this thread!
It's a collaborative board game where 2 to 8 players team up to cure 4 simultaneous diseases, by trying to find a vaccine and using the specific skills you get with your randomly assigned role to help you.
I started playing that game on New Year's Eve with my friends after eating a fondue. Back then, we just started to hear about things happening in Wuhan and made jokes about it while playing. We found the game really hard and couldn't win on the first evening but we kept playing from time to time, and we love it. Since we think in similar ways gameplay goes smoothly and nobody gets angry. I never played a collaborative board game before and it has been a lot of fun. If you have recommendations, please send them!
A few months later, after the first quarantine in France and before the second (and current) quarantine, we went in an abandoned building and played from there. Now that we're stuck home again, one of my friends is building a web app to play board games online, just for the sake of playing Pandemic; it will just handle card stacks, and placing images on top of other images, without implementing any particular rules, and might include an audio chat. I've been reflecting on variants of the game, either to make it a little simpler or to add new mechanics; you can look at a bit of that
here.
We never chose to play Pandemic because of the pandemic, it was because my friend got it as a gift a few months earlier, but I will still mention it here because it motivated us and gave us more reasons to do things together.
Since April (the beginning of the first quarantine here), I've been lurking on the mailing lists of
Agora Nomic. I had heard of
nomics before, games where the rules are to change the rules, and found out Agora is one of the largest games still running; it is over 27 years old!
Agora is currently played on two mailing lists and two backup mailing lists, and discussed on another mailing list, an IRC channel and a Discord server. It is pretty interesting though in times of high activity it can be pretty hard to follow along and there's a lot of jargon; the most common acronym for example NttPF and its companion TTttPF (Not to the Public Forum and This Time to the Public Forum), because if you post to the discussion mailing list (a "discussion forum") it doesn't count as an actual in-game action, that goes to the
business or
official lists ("public forums"). A fun one that we rarely see but that I like is
ATEOISIDTIDWHPAFALT. I won't try to explain that one, can you guess without looking it up online?
I finally decided I would join in the beginning of the month and helped the
Reportor, an initiative to summarize each week of gameplay for archival. It's great to force myself to pay attention to the game. In parallel, I also got a nomic started on Breadpunk.club, the
breadnomic.
Back to video games: I played Euro Truck Simulator 2 a lot during quarantine because me and my IRL friends like to truck together there. It's pretty nice, and as long as you don't go into the drama along TruckersMP (the unofficial multiplayer mod), their events and those of TruckersFM (a real webradio focused on ETS2) are pretty nice. This game is 6 years old and it still has an active community, and the studio keeps on adding content while caring about the players' feedbacks.
I started playing Cooking Simulator and Cities Skylines by myself, mostly because I got them on sale, and I like them a lot. I can waste a lot of time in Cooking Simulator trying to create cursed dishes (what if i made soup but using coke instead of water? or what if i made a
pepperoni and green pepper sandwich?), and I waste a lot of time either trying to build a good city then fixing all the traffic jams, or trying to build the worst city and watching my citizens struggle.
____________________
~lucidiot