This is the first of a two-part series, discussing computer/board game crossovers. This version will cover the highlights. Next article covers the not-so-highlights.

The bane of every Bridge player’s existence is the cold, hateful fact that you need exactly four people to play. Getting exactly four when you want them requires both planning and luck. If you want to play more often than you can manage to get four people together at the same time—or if you want to play just a couple of hands—playing on the Internet is the way to go. I can’t recommend Yahoo Bridge, which is populated by what might generously be called “complete morons.” Bridge Base Online is the way to go; people there know and play American conventions, even if they don’t speak much English.

Chess isn’t usually quite as hard to get people together for, but playing against the same person, or the same handful of people, over and over can get tiring. There are a bunch of free chess servers online (enough that I don’t need to recommend any; Google will lead the way) and plenty of good players for whatever kind of game you want to play at whatever time. I hear even Death logs on from time to time; you’ll know him because he will want to know HOW THE LITTLE HORSE-SHAPED ONES MOVE.

Several years ago I was introduced to the board game Titan. Invented back in the time when saber-toothed tigers and mainframes roamed the earth, Titan featured Byzantine rules for moving your little stacks of creatures around the board and having them recruit additional followers. Your movement options differed based on whether you were starting on a square or just passing through, and the bookkeeping was downright incredible. When one stack attacked another, the players involved broke into a mini-game-combat that could last for 20 minutes. Everyone else got to sit and watch. To make matters even worse, the game required at least 3 people to be any good and players lost by being eliminated, which meant that one or more players would be sitting out for a third or more of what might be a six-hour-long game. Hope there’s something good on TV…

Eons later, Java was invented and some brave soul ported the game to Java, and even managed to put a decent AI onto it. To my great surprise, I found that the game was actually fun with a computer around to handle the massively complicated rules. Deciding how to move your stacks around is easy (the computer tells you where you can move and what you can recruit) and combat usually takes under a minute. Even beating up the AIs is exciting. The Java port, which is free, is called Colossus.

Iron Dragon, a railroad game in the Empire Builder series, benefits similarly from a computer to handle the bookkeeping busywork. In particular, the Undo button is like magic for helping players get through their turns quickly. It also lets you or you and your friend play in the highly-likely scenario that you can’t dig up the 3-6 players and 2-4 hours needed for a good game in person. Unfortunately, this one isn’t free, but if you like the game it’s probably worth getting.