Are you a fan of board games? Have you ever played online? Ivan, a product manager, set up online board game nights to keep playing during the past few months. I’ve joined in a couple of times, and it was all good fun, no stress. Read how he did it.

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I am a big fan of board games, and from March onwards the global pandemic situation made it impossible to host gaming nights on a regular basis. At some point I thought that I might not be the only one who misses playing board games and having conversations. So why not try to do it online?

I then checked if my friends were also interested in playing online board games. When I got a couple of confirmations, I posted on LinkedIn and Twitter and found that more people wanted to join.

SEO boardgaming group is keep going! In half an hour we'll be learning and playing Roll Player by @thunderworksgam on @TabletopiaGames
I guess @simoncox and @MontseCano will join today. Hope to see @fighto @JulesGrimm @njmott @GregGifford on Sunday for some Wingspan action 🙂 pic.twitter.com/CjxT66edeB

— Ivan Karmanov (@Ellanorsh) May 20, 2020

It is always great to play board games not only with your friends, but also meet new people! Luckily, I got a lot of interest and met new friends.

The platform

Choosing a platform to play games was a no-brainer. My side gig is a platform for online board games called Tabletopia.

To host the board gaming night, all that I did was sending an invitation to friends to play on Tabletopia and a link on Zoom. My friends just needed to click on my invite link, type their names in, select an avatar from the gallery and that’s it, we started playing. We use Zoom, so that we can see each other and have a conversation while playing, just as in the offline world.

We had two games per week, which helped me a lot during the lockdown. I met new friends from around the world, I had a great time chatting, and I discovered new great board games that we all tried for the first time!