I went to university between the second half of the 80's and the first half of the 90's. Due to this accident of history, I had access to the early internet years before most people even knew what that was. I was on a mainframe computer with a text-only screen, but I was using Bulletin Board System and Usenet, the social media of the day. And I was even already playing LPMud, one of the first online multiplayer games. Then I also was relatively early having internet at home, and played Ultima Online on a dial-up connection (which was an extremely bad idea leading to a very high phone bill). I started this blog in 2003, had some success for some year, and was basically an early "influencer", with a specialization in online games. And from these decades of experience, my conclusion is that playing online sucks. Which is why today I have two to three face-to-face board game nights / afternoons per week, but I don't play board games online, and really rarely play anything online anymore.

There are two main factors to that, which are connected. The first is that the social interaction with a person online is diminished, compared to the social interaction you would have with that same person if he or her was in the same room with you, sitting around the same table. The second is that the diminished social interaction leads to people behaving less good online than they behave face to face.

Of course there is a whole spectrum of online interaction. Some social media are so toxic, that most of the exchange is rare in face-to-face situations, because it would lead to somebody punching somebody in the face. Early Ultima Online was full of "player killers", who had fun ruining the game for others. On the other hand, a lot of the people I met in online games were nice enough; but still they didn't feel the same engagement and the same social pressure to comply with rules of politeness that they would have felt sitting across the table from me. A typical example would be a player leaving early: Happened a lot to me in games like World of Warcraft, with one player dropping out of a dungeon run, and the other 4 struggling to continue or find a replacement. It would take some really serious event before a player at my board game night would get up and leave early.

All in all, I feel a lot more connected to the other players around the same table than I feel connected to people I play with online. It is that human interaction which is a big part of my interest in board games. Which now leads to the question of when a board game stops being a board game. On the one side I can see the advantage: We had a not so great board game session on Sunday with game 2 of Clank Legacy 2, because there was just too much administrative overhead. We spent hours finding sheets of stickers, peeling the stickers off the sheet, adding new rule stickers to the rulebook, learning new rules, in addition to doing all the non-legacy administrative tasks of moving around cards and tokens. I have a classic Sword & Sorcery board game, and it is administratively heavy, so I can clearly see how a computer might help. There are board games like Gloomhaven, where I rather play the digital version solo, because setup and play as a real board game is so much work. But if I play Teburu Dungeon: Sword & Sorcery, and all 4 players are constantly looking at their phones, because that is where their character sheets are, and where they interact with the game, is that still a board game? How much does the electronic part take away from the valuable real world interaction with the other players?

I think I will have to just try it, even if obviously a hybrid electronic / board game will be a lot more expensive than a classic cardboard only board game. I didn't buy the first two Teburu games, but knowing that Sword & Sorcery is fundamentally a game I like, I am willing to try the hybrid version of it. This being a crowdfunded game, it is good that I am not in a hurry, because I don't know how long it takes before I actually get the game delivered. I also hope that the Teburu system is still ongoing technical improvements, because some of the comments about the first two Teburu games reported on technical problems. Some people don't play any board games that use apps, because they are afraid that the app might stop working and their game become useless. I very much like apps in narrative games, because professional voice actors are so much better than players having to read long walls of text aloud. But I do feel as if there could be a point where the digitalization of a board game goes too far, and a real life social interaction suffers from it.

[EDIT: 5 hours later. In the end, I decided against Teburu Dungeon: Sword & Sorcery. The reason was that the cheapest option consisted of a conversion kit for my existing Sword & Sorcery: Immortal Souls game, and that would have cost €70 for the conversion kit, plus €100 for the Teburu board, plus €29 shipping, plus €41 VAT. That's a total of €240 for zero added game content, just turning my cardboard game into a hybrid board / electronic game and possibly enabling me to play it faster. If I wanted expansions, I would have to add another €100 for those, another €10 for shipping, and another €23 for VAT. That is a lot of money for a system I am not even sure I will like, and far too much for "I'll just try it".]