It’s easy to get wrapped up in the hot new graphics and the engaging gameplay you get with modern game releases – but there’s always a place for the classics as well. What would a childhood be without the strategic consideration of Risk, the less strategic consideration of Connect 4 and the friendship ending enterprise that is the Parker Brother’s Monopoly. While it’s fairly common knowledge that some table games made the jump to cyber-space, you can play play roulette online at a whole host of great sites after all, it’s perhaps less commonly known that you can play a lot of these boardgame classics online as well! Here are a few recommendations to get you started.

Scrabble

Ahhh, nothing beats the old “Grab a Dictionary” feel of Scrabble – you’ll soon be reaching for old English lessons to argue spellings and possibly smack some sense into your colleagues who insist that queue isn’t a word. And now with the marvellous power of the internet, you can play this with anyone across the world! There are a number of imitations too which could be worth having a look in, in particular Words with Friends is a popular derivation for the online age that lets you test your vocabulary against just about anyone in the world. Which only creates a new problem of what languages are allowed but we’re sure you can handle that.

Chess

Loved the world over and almost ubiquitous with the concept of ‘strategic brilliance’, Chess was one of the first boardgames to make the leap into digital space with Los Alamos chess in 1956 where it became possible to play chess against the computer for the very first time. In fact, as the technology has developed, besting the computer at its own game has been something of a mark of skill as the AI has improved over the years with many famous players, such as Gary Kasparov, continuously improving and enhancing the AI to make it harder to best. It wasn’t until 1997 that it was possible for players to test their mettle against each other with a downloadable client which, much like Chess AI, has only improved. These days you can play against just about anyone in the world with a click of the mouse – though you’re probably going to find out there’s a lot of very, very good players online.

Monopoly

The big one – the friendship ruiner. The only popular global boardgame named after a fiscal crime and also one of the few to have more than a 100 different versions of the game all floating around and to have held multiple world championships over the years. Monopoly has produced several video games over the years but they were relatively late adopters of the online game with a majority intended for play at home. One of the cooler entries though is Monopoly: City Streets which works online and uses GoogleMaps and OpenStreetMap to give you a more custom, home based experience – you can check out the details for that here.

There are, of course, a ton of other games out there which have made the jump to online – which one do you think everyone should be playing? Let us know in the comments below!

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7 COMMENTS

  1. “Analogue” sounds a bit weird for describing non-digital games, because I tend to think of analog clocks or something relying on a physical mechanism such as pressure, volume, gravity, water, etc.

    But anyway, it’s no surprise that non-digital games are moving to digital platforms. A lot of popular tabletop games (card games, board games, dice games, etc.) are already like that, including Uno, Pandemic, Arkham Horror, Magic, etc. Considering the Internet is an open place full of new faces, it’s no surprise that these games are on digital platforms; plus, you don’t have to rely on finding real-life friends to play games with, when you can play online with other people.

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