Tables

Our eight-person online gaming group has added a new feature to spice up our weekly game nights.

We have been struggling for years to discover and play more games that can accommodate all of us on Board Game Arena. We’ve played some of the best (e.g. Challengers, Incan Gold, Papayoo), but there are other games for 3-5 that we’d like to try as well (Catan, Ticket to Ride, Azul).

How do you encourage two or more games going at once on your video conference?

Board Game Cafe

We have come up with an idea to hold a small tournament whenever we want to play a game for less people. But we don’t want to set up the overhead involved in a full-scale tournament on BGA.

Instead, we are using the concept of Tables. It’s as if we were spending the evening together at two adjacent tables in the same noisy board game cafe, but the games “count” for something.

One table has the best players, and the other has players who are learning the game but are advancing in their skills.

At the end of each game, the winning players move up and the losing players move down.

Lisbon and Porto

Let’s use the four-person game Azul as an example.

With eight players, we created two tables of four. Table 1 is named “Lisbon,” and Table 2 is named “Porto.” At Lisbon, we placed the four players with the highest ratings (ELO) on BGA. The lowest-rated players sat at Porto.

When each game was done, the two losing players at Lisbon moved down to play their next game at Porto. The two winners at Porto moved up to Lisbon.

We then decided whether to play again, or move to another game, but we kept the table arrangements in a spreadsheet for the next time we wanted to play Azul in this format.

Variety

We found our online game night became far more interesting with the increased variety of games. We find ourselves moving back and forth from playing two four-person games as well an eight-player game, all on the same night, We grant the winner of the highest or only table the privilege to decide what to play next.

And now we have a lot of “new” games we’ve never played to add to our game night.

Published March 2, 2025.