Heya,
I do YouTube videos, and I love board games. I’ve been wanting to start a regular board game feature for some time now so I recently played and recorded a session of Battlestar Galactica via the VASSAL Engine. Despite not being a tightly edited segment filled with beautiful people like Tabletop the reception has been fantastic, with 15k views and 2k upvotes in less than 48 hours.
Unfortunately, I don’t really have the proper setup for recording physical games, so VASSAL (or similar software) is going to be the best way to work this. There are hundreds of modules for VASSAL though, not to mention plenty of places online that offer software to play something like Agricola that may or may not be good.
TLDR: Does anyone have a list of proven websites, software packages, or VASSAL modules that work well for online play?
I think that’s mostly going to depend on what kind of games you like and that you think your audience would like to see played.
Most of the VASSAL modules created in recent years are made using the original artwork of the boardgame, supplied by the boardgame company, so that although a module designer can do a better or worse job of integrating the elements, what a game will “look like in VASSAL” is substantially related to what it looks like on the table in real life.
For one module that I worked on recently, All Bridges Burning, we made a special effort to make the “wooden pieces” look at least somewhat photorealistic, but it’s still, you know, a VASSAL module, and whether it’s appropriate for your videos depends mostly on whether you and your audience would like to play a 3-player COIN game about the Finnish Civil War!
If you named some particular types of games, topics, etc that you’d like to pursue, I’m sure folks could chime in with specific suggestions.
Brian