Board games don’t belong on computers. They’re a refuge from the screens that bore into our eyeballs and our lives, a chance to bask in the musky glow of fleshy humans. But sometimes those humans are far away, and sometimes stores give digitised board games away for free. The Epic Games Store is handing out the tile-laying town-planning sheep-appreciating Carcassonne, along with the railway-building Ticket To Ride. Ticket’s fine, but Carcassonne is way better.

Epic were originally going to give Pandemic away too, but issued a press release saying they’d scrapped those plans until “a later date”. Presumably someone rethought the optics of using a game about global infection to advertise their store during the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

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Sometimes, when a board game loves a personal computer very much, they create something new. Fanatical have got seven digified board games on sale, and there are some gooduns tucked between those I’m not familiar with. Small World 2 and Splendor are my highlights, though there’s also the likes of Pandemic, Carcassonne, Mysterium and Ticket To Ride.

Digital board games tend to be a poor substitute for playing against real world fleshsacks. But sometimes there are no fleshsacks within reach.

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