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.
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.”
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.
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 feel like we all independently invented the absolute LAN party classic of halo system link:
Hang em high with rocket launchers & plasma grenades only.
Nearly as iconic as blood gulch IMO
Halo CE Hang ‘em High on the original Xbox with Rockets and Grenades (we didn’t specify… frags were game too) will always be one of my favorites.
That, and Sidewinder CTF. Those were some of the most intense hours of my young adulthood in college.
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.
GoldenEye split screen.
Maybe I had weird friends but for us it was Colin McRae Rally 2
If by weird you mean awesome.
For me it was Quake II on SNES - in like 2005, long after SNES’ heyday. My buddies never knew that I had spent months playing the campaigns by myself, practicing with the railgun.
The AKI lineage of wrestling games for us (WCW vs NWO, WCW Revenge, Virtual Pro Wrestling, Wrestlemania 2000, No Mercy, VPW2). Good times.
On a black and white tv, too. Somehow.
I split an RCA cable so my brother and I could play on 2 old Commodore 64 monitors, each half-covered with construction paper.
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
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.
i had some lan parties a few years ago at my apartment. best time of my life, everyone would come over and play something
Well this hits home for me.
My first experience playing Halo was checking it out at a friend’s place in college in 2001 and proceeding to play several hours of split screen co-op all night. It was awesome.
My most recent experience playing Halo was earlier this evening, playing split screen co-op with my son. We ran around the island in The Silent Cartographer just blasting the shit out of covenant, our fellow soldiers, and each other. Though admittedly a lot of the latter was me running around like an idiot while the kid blasted my corpse high into the sky. It was also awesome.
God, this is where I want to be in the future as well.
I sent that image to the guy from college. It was the first time I’d messaged him since 2016. He responded within seconds with “those were the days.” Then he asked about the family and we discussed what games we play with our kids now.
Mine is about to start 2nd grade, so still pretty young, but I can always enjoy some chaotic Halo with occasional friendly fire. (Skulls enabled to give unlimited ammo and grenades — extra chaotic!)
I am being physically attacked.
deedeedeedeedeedeedeedee
HEADSHOT
UT99 for me. Diablo II for others.
UT3 was so smooth and fast, scaled so good 😁
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.
My friends and I used to hold sleepovers a play games, usually single player. We had roles: Player, guide reader, peanut gallery. And we would just rotate, stepping in if we knew one was better at this than the other. I played Kingdom Hearts with them like that, and Fatal Frame now that I think about it. Dang.
Edit: I love seeing how many people had a similar friend/game set up. Warms my heart. ♥️
We did this with Resident Evil and Silent Hill. One dude was playing, the others watched it like an interactive movie, giving hints and suggestions. It was so great.
I’m sure you got great memories from that. Awesome game choices ❤️
My friends and I did the same thing except with the Marathon series
We did something similar, it’s how we saved all people in Dead Rising. We used to do this for so many single player games, it was such always such a laugh, and we got to finish games I probably wouldn’t play by myself.
I stopped WoW in 2012. Last night I dreamt of Naxxramas.
I believe that’s called a “nightmare”
Only when the raid wipes right before downing the last boss of the 4th wing
Who’s cutting onions?
(Except for me it was Marathon and Descent)
Man, we only got coop Descent going with my family. Would have been nuts playing with more people.
I used to play by dialing directly to my friend’s computer via modem. He only had a 66MHz processor, and I had 100MHz. So if I came at him blasting away with the plasma cannon his machine couldn’t render the frames fast enough, and he’d die. So he’d creep around the map with charged fusion cannons to one-shot me.
Peak strategy based on unfair circumstances, that’s funny
The cool part was that it both leveled the playing field - because he knew the maps better - and made it really fun game of cat and mouse.
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”…
It was halo 3 custom games and race tracks for me. Halo just is 't the same anymore.
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Tell me that’s a typo
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Mongoose death races in forge on Sandtrap using lots of plasma coils…
It blew my mind back in the mid 90s the first time I played Doom in lan with a couple buddies. His dad had some sort of tech job and set up a couple desktops in the basement for us.
MORE THAN ONE COMPUTER IN A HOUSE?!
Best sleepover ever.
My friends would just bring their computers to each other’s house for a sleepover. Along with their 50 pound monitor. I was amazed the little card table we sat at didn’t collapse.
My friends and I played a ton of Doom on my company LAN back then. Getting it set up and working was a challenge but so worth it. Very fond memories.
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.
