San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
ESCAPE ROOMS, BOARD GAMES GO ONLINE
Back before the coronavirus struck, my friends and I used to gather on a semiregular basis to play tabletop board games. We’d block out a weekend afternoon and evening, assemble at someone’s house, and pass a few cheerful, competitive hours over something meaty like Agricola or Terraforming Mars.
Then in March, that all went away. Or rather, like so much of the life we once knew, it migrated online. Gettogethers became Zoom sessions, and my friends and I began seeking out internet settings to take the place of physical cards, dice and other game pieces across an actual table.
We didn’t have far to look. Not surprisingly, tabletop gaming enthusiasts around the world have found themselves in the same predicament, and websites designed to accommodate them have seen a surge in interest.
Take, for example, Board Game Arena (boardgamearena.com), one of the leading sites where gamers can face off in a virtual setting. The site claims more than 4 million users in 300 countries worldwide; at any given moment there are thousands of players on it, immersed in everything from a simple card game to the most elaborate strategy conflict. (Participation is free, and the site also offers a paid membership with premium benefits.)
But not even a site of that size was quite prepared for the explosion of demand brought on by COVID19.
“There was a big burst right at the beginning, when the spread in Italy was so bad,” the site’s art director Ian Parovel said during a Skype interview from his home in Paris, “and then again when France went into lockdown. For a while we had so many upgrades and repairs to do, but we had to put them off just to handle the traffic.”
In contrast with video games — for which computers and the internet are a natural habitat — tabletop gaming is a migrant to the online world. Games that are built to exist in physical space need to be reverseengineered to operate digitally, a task for which Board Game Arena draws on the efforts of a host of coders.
Yet even board games fit more comfortably into a virtual arena than escape rooms, the puzzlesolving craze that has become ubiquitous over the past decade. Even though the idea sprang from video games — as a simulation of the player’s search for the exit from a locked room — the reallife installations that have sprouted up around the globe are largely intended for players who can touch the props, reach behind the furniture and finagle the combination locks until they spring open.
“Our physical rooms are designed to be there in person,” said Chris Alden, the founder of Palace Games (palacegames.com), whose suite of four escape rooms at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts has been acclaimed by aficionados. “So the physical experiences will have to wait until we can bring people back in.”
For Palace Games, the timing could hardly have been worse, Alden says. The company’s newest and most intricately designed room, two years in the making, was set to open in March. Now it’s on hold, and Alden and his team have crafted an onlineonly adventure game called “The Palace of Destiny” to tide patrons over.
Many other escape room outfits, though, have managed to keep patrons coming through by using their own staff as proxy players.
“A standard technique is to let the game master move through the space with a camera, acting like an avatar for the players,” said Tom Parslow, a London software engineer and escape room enthusiast. Parslow’s main business provides software for escape rooms, but soon after the pandemic hit he began compiling a comprehensive list (livevideoescaperooms.com) of rooms that are operating remotely.
“Playing by way of the internet does lack some of the tactile dimension,” he said in a Skype interview. “But a lot of escape rooms are about noticing things, working out the codes, figuring out whether you can put these two things together, and that all works fine online. And having a game master participating in character can be a nice addition.”
What all these online game and puzzle venues share is the ability to bring together friends and family members who may not be in the same physical space. An escape room team need not be together to play a room together — nor, for that matter, be in the same city as the escape room, which is a boon for more geographically remote outfits, Parslow says.
And the social benefits of board game night are practically baked into the online version. According to Parovel, Board Game Arena was founded in 2010 by two friends, Grégory Isabelli and Emmanuel Colin, whose main goal was to meet fellow gaming enthusiasts; the idea of actually playing online only came along as a result.
The same thing happened to Luke Tsekouras, an Australian software engineer whose modest website (netgames.io) offers a handful of games like Codenames and Werewolf that are keyed to social interactions.
“I started coding these games about two or three years ago for my phone because I was playing a lot of board games with friends, and I was tired of lugging the boxes around,” he said in a Skype interview. When COVID19 hit, he said, the site leaped from 3,500 monthly users to about 270,000.
That’s a testament to the general appeal of game playing, but also of the need for interpersonal connection — and again, I speak from experience. Sessions of Codenames, which used to be a feature of the annual or biannual gatherings of my extended family, have morphed into a centerpiece of our weekly Zoom sessions.
“I’m especially partial to games where the people you’re with are the source of the entertainment,” said Tsekouras. “I like games where you get a chance to talk and catch up with people, not just stare at the board.”
Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. Email: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman