Is there an actually good online board/card game service for regular games like chess/checkers/hearts/etc? Googling stuff like this results in huge numbers of places to play huge numbers of games with huge numbers of anonymous people. I just want to play a game of Rook or Checkers with my family in other states. I want it to be easy to find my friend and play against them without looking through a chatroom list of hundreds of people.

Yahoo games. Simple.

What about Risk? Might be better online, without having to count all the little dudes.

yahoo games or msn zone.

Quote: Original post by d000hg
What about Risk? Might be better online, without having to count all the little dudes.

I think he wants to keep his friends. Even Risk 2210 has put scars in my social group that will never heal.

I threw together a program awhile back that let you use bitmaps for boards, game pieces, dice, and cards. In theory you could play pretty much whatever you want over the internet. Worked ok too other than that maybe the controls weren't very intuitive and I was never able to make connecting with people all that user friendly or work through firewalls. I was determined to make it work peer to peer and that was probably my second mistake. First mistake was using direct play.

Quote: Original post by d000hg
What about Risk? Might be better online, without having to count all the little dudes.

It's hard enough getting 3-4 people you personally know, who love risk, and you can visibly see, stick around long enough to finish a game.

I got risk for the PC a few years back and it went like this:

1. wait 30 seconds for matchmaking
2. 3 people select countries really fast
3. 1 person takes forever
4. game starts
5. 3 people do their turns relatively quickly, asshat takes forever to do nothing
6. 2 rounds in, 1 person gets bored of slow guy and quits
7. Slow guy times out
8. you and the other guy left battle the neutral armies left for easy territories
9. an hour and a half later the other guy quits
10. You just wasted 2 hours of your life

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
games like chess/checkers/hearts/etc?

The best Hearts Game I have come across is Hardwood Hearts. There's a rating system, and most players know how to play the game -- no senseless dumping, aiming for low, cover passes, let high moon to prolong the game etc.