For quite a while, nearly every Saturday, I have a core group that plays games together. Two of the core games that brought us together are Natural Selection (2002) and Guild Wars (2005) though our regular weekend gaming didn’t start till sometime later after that. I am uncertain when we started doing regular gaming together since we previously used IRC for collaboration, but our shared calendar’s oldest entry is 2018-11-25.

One of the challenges of the group, is our distributed timezones with one in the United States, one in Canada, one in the United Kingdom, and one in Japan. Our current game time is pinned to one member’s daughter’s bed time. This mostly works due to our UK member being fine with an all nighter.

We generally do not have trouble picking games, as our interests are fairly similar, thought not all games work for 4 player coop which can occasionally restrict our choices.

We have cleared most games that we have started, though there have been a few we dropped due to balance issues that resulted in more frustration than fun. We did complete a single run of Civ 6, though I think we’re unlikely to try another similar game, since the turn based waiting was not always well aligned with a once a week session.

Building games like Raft , Satisfactory , and Factorio have been favorites due to the cooperative nature and how each of our group tends to favor different aspects of the game. We have also really enjoyed replaying games like Guild Wars (the game that initially brought us together) or the craziness of something like Borderlands or Deep Rock Galactic .