Bostich.comboard and miniature gaming

If you love Eurogames and are not familiar with BrettSpielWelt than you should be.   BrettSpielWelt (or BSW) is a free online portal and application for playing many of the most popular board and card games available today.  It can be intimidating at first because BSW is primarily in German, but people of all languages populate the site and help and translations abound.

BSW covers game from the very popular Carcassonne (Game, BGG , BSW) or Settlers of Catan (Game, BGG, BSW), to games popular with more dedicated boardgame enthusiasts like Power Grid (Game, BGG, BSW) and Imperial (Game, BGG, BSW).

BrettSpielWelt Main Lobby

The Main Lobby can seem intimidating or just down right chaotic to  a newcomer.  What’s going on here are games that are not yet begun and are looking for players are listed here.  Games in green can be joined directly while games in brown will take you to that game where you can then ask to join.  The small gears in the lower right corner allow you to filter what types of games you see.  By default only friendly non-competitive games are shown.

If you are unfamiliar with a game I’d highly recommend checking it out on BoardGameGeek first.  The controls per game are usually fairly intuitive but if you’re not familiar with the general flow of the game it can be a stumbling block.  I have never tried playing a game on BSW before trying it in real life, so I can’t speak to how that experience would go.  In general however, people on BSW are quite helpful if it’s a casual game.

Example of a game play area - Dominion

The BSW website has a great help area where the gameplay of each game is explained (for example help with Dominion).  Once you have played a few games the rhythm comes naturally and you can focus on your strategy.

Even though it doesn’t have the most glamorous interface, BSW is probably the best way to play your favorite boardgames online.  There are other options like VASSAL if you are in to longer and more strategic games, or if you own an XBOX360 you can now play some of these games and others like Ticket to Ride on Xbox Live.

BrettSpielWelt is available for multiple platforms including MAC from BSWs download page.