Tabletop games (with one player remote)

The Game Room
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My D&D group has decided to take a hiatus from D&D, but we’d still like to get together in person (we’re all vaccinated and boosted) on a regular basis to play something or other. The catch is that one member of the group is also taking an indefinite hiatus from being in the same state as the rest of us, and we’d like to still include him. OK, so he’ll obviously have to be present virtually, but we’d still like to avoid the situation where everyone is sitting around the table, each of us looking at our own screen: We’d like to play a game that’s still, as much as possible, an in-person game. But with one player virtual.

Which is tougher than it sounds. Any sort of card game, for instance, is problematic, because cards are either all virtual, or all physical.

So far, the best we’ve come up with is Trivial Pursuit. Most of the interaction is by voice, and what little visual there is is just moving around on the board, which is fairly trivial (one of the in-person players could basically just say “OK, from here with that die roll, you could reach a blue, a green, or an orange”).

Any other suggestions?

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How many people total are we talking about?

Maybe some type of team game like Pictionary? Everyone would have to look at a screen for your remote friend’s turn, or he could just be a guesser only.

Or a cooperative game like Forbidden Desert or Castle Panic where anyone else could move his pieces for him and he could contribute with strategy.

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Seven people total, six in person and one remote.

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I’m not familiar with Forbidden Desert, but I’d personally advise against a game like Castle Panic. I’ve played tabletop games with one player remote, viewing the table through a webcam, and the biggest issue was always the one remote player literally lacking perspective - we constantly had to adjust the webcam to give him a better view, and it was still difficult for him to keep track of positions (and he was a veteran wargamer for whom tracking tabletop positions was second nature). For a game like Castle Panic, which literally has a lot of moving parts, I’d think it would be almost impossible for the remote player to have a sense of the board.

One game that comes to mind is Cartographers. I don’t particularly care for it, but that’s because it’s just not my kind of game. The rest of my gaming group loves it. The big advantage is that the remote player would just need a copy of the map pad, and a webcam focused on the common cards. Everyone basically plays their own mini-game on their map pad based on the common cards - there’s no real player interaction other than table chat and comparing point totals, and showing off your map at the end (which, again, webcam should suffice).

I think there are other Eurogames in that design space, where the players have minimal interaction, but those often involve common physical resources that need to be passed around. There may be other games like Cartographers where you just need a commonly viewed reference that would work as well, but that’s not a game design space I’m very familiar with.

There are also social deduction games (another game space I don’t particularly care for and thus am not terribly familiar with) that would probably work fairly well with a remote player on a webcam. For example, as long as everyone stays in-frame, I don’t see why One Night Werewolf or a similar game shouldn’t work with one player remote.

If you’re open to an RPG other than D&D, a system that’s designed for “theater of the mind”, like FATE, GUMSHOE, or Powered by the Apocalypse could be a fun option, with a webcam on each end so you can all see each other and have something approaching normal table interactions.

More ambitiously, I’ve seen groups using a flatscreen turned on its back displaying a Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds map. If you go that route, everyone in-person could sit around the “table”, sharing that one screen, while your remote player logs into R20/FG and uses it the normal way.

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Sounds like you need software facilitating “mental poker”

ETA I agree that it will be annoying that the cards are mostly “virtual”, even though it would be possible in principle, and subject to an annoying delay each time, to give people actual cards to hold

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One other constraint I should mention is that the game should either be one that most or all of us are familiar with, or one that can be learned quickly. We don’t want to be spending most of our game night just figuring out how the heck to play whatever game we decide to go with.

And I think that RPGs in general are probably on hiatus, and there would probably be resistance to learning an entirely new system.

I hadn’t thought of Mafia/Werewolf, but doesn’t that depend on at least some level of communication between the wolves/gangsters (even if it’s just finger-pointing while everyone else’s eyes are closed)? It might be hard to facilitate that while simultaneously obscuring who, exactly, is communicating.

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Cartographers is one of those “simple to learn, difficult to master” Eurogames. It has a very low initial learning curve. Again, I personally don’t much care for that general style of game, but everyone else in my group picked it up very quickly and loved it. It’s actually almost too quick - you’re not going to get a whole evening out of it, unless you play several games back-to-back, but as one of a few small games, or the one game if everyone has fun and wants to make more maps, I think it should be fine.

Yeah, but if you’re using a webcam and make sure everyone’s actually in frame before they close their eyes, it seems to me like it would work. I’d think you really just need everyones’ faces and upper torsos visible, and everyone needs to make sure they’re gesturing in that framing area so they’re easily visible to the remote player and vice versa.

Another (maybe overly ambitious) option would be to do the common screen for the in-person players and Tabletop Simulator for a board game everyone in your group already knows. I personally find it too fiddly and clunky to be much fun, but a lot of other tabletop gamers, including several in my personal group, love it. Some other tabletop games, like Sentinals of the Multiverse and Fury of Dracula and Scythe, also have proprietary app/online versions, and again the in-person players could share a common screen. You might look to see if a favorite board game that group is already familiar with has an app/online version.

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The various Jackbox party packs might be right up your alley.

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Y’all got phones, right? Text messages.

Just make sure everyone turns off alerts.

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I should have thought of that, myself. Yeah, I definitely second this. They’re very much designed for play with a common screen for in-person players and with one or more remote players.

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Just to circle back to this…

Powered by the Apocalypse games are pretty much all explicitly and specifically designed as pick-up-and-play games. Players get a “playbook” that basically gives them the entire game in four pages right in front of them, and a complete character with only a few simple choices. In my experience, the GM does need to have a bit more comfort with the system, and more importantly needs to be very comfortable with improvisation and player-guided stories.

FATE has drifted a bit from that model - I think the current iterations of FATE are really pick-up-and-play settings for players already familiar with FATE, but the “FATE 1.0” game, Spirit of the Century, was very specifically and explicitly designed as a pick-up-and-play, learn-as-you-play game.

In that same general design space, I love Flatland Games’ OSR games, Beyond the Wall (sort of smallcore trad fantasy) and Through Sunken Lands (swords & sorcery). Even more than PbtA and FATE, they’re designed as pick-up-and-play games, with playbooks for the players and the GM. And based on OSR, so if your group are already familiar with D&D, they already know how to play them. I personally think they are just absolutely brilliant designs.

That said, of course, your group may just want to take a break from RPGs. And I know some players are very resistant to learning a new system, even a simple pick-up-and-play system. But if your group is willing to give them a go, I think their “theater of the mind” style would work well with one remote player.

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I think we’re on a break from RPGs in general, not just D&D specifically.

It looks like these are computer games-- Would this be based on “one big screen in the middle of the table”? I don’t know how other players would feel about that…

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They’re party games, aimed at a casual audience.

Everyone plays on their own phone or tablet, but all the players also share a common screen - typically a normal flatscreen TV at the front of the living room. I think (but I’m not sure) that the remote player can log in and mirror the common screen on their own TV or computer, but at worst you can aim a webcam at your TV so the remote player can see that screen. Since everyone uses their own phone or tablet over the internet as their controller/input device, the remote player would have exactly the same interactive experience with the game as the in-person players.

Again, these are party games, not hobby games, but if your group is ok with Trivial Pursuit, I’d think they’d be ok with Jackbox (in fact, I’m pretty sure Jackbox has trivia games).