Playing remotely: Spaceteam
Mr. Spock can't stop me (I'm on fire tonight)
The Wrath of Khan can't stop me (I'm on fire tonight)
The Borg can't stop me (I'm on fire tonight)
Because I've got space game and it feels all right
MC Lars: Spacegame
Human interaction is connection. We have a group of people, we talk. We tell stories and share and connect.
And we play games!
Here at Flowa we have a long tradition of playing all kind of games together. There is a function: sometimes energy levels are low at the start of a meeting. There's hardly a better way to get some juice flowing in your system than focusing on something hectic with a common goal among players. Spaceteam is a pretty brilliant game for this purpose.
The game in general
The game runs on android or ios devices. Tablets or mobile phones. You can get it from the respective stores. The free version is pretty wast, but I totally recommend supporting the developer trough in-game purchases. I'd say the extras are mostly cosmetic, but good fun.
Theme and narrative is pretty cool: You are the crew of a spaceship flying to... somewhere. Who cares, because everyone of you has their own set of buttons, knobs and gadgets to manage. The thing is that everyone also gets a different set of instructions, like "engage hyperplexer". But the hyperplexer may be (and usually is) controlled by somebody else! So the game is more or less frantic yelling of different kind of instructions and trying to figure out what knob to twist and button to push.
And there are asteroids, wormholes, all kinds of things danger lurking around the deep cold void of space. Eventually you will blow up. And because it was such a bundle of fun, you will try again!
The game is also translated to many languages. Maybe you would like to play it in Finnish? or Italian? Or in any other language but not your native one? I doubt it's educational in itself, but jolly good fun!
The game used to need the devices to be in same network or connected by Bluetooth, but this constraint is no more. It's possible to connect devices through internet, and that's really simple: you just need a shared password.
How to play remotely
With the internet connection mode, this is really simple. You just need a video conferencing software. The game itself plays pretty much the same way as it would locally: Everybody has their own device and the laughter and funny facial expressions are channeled through the audio and video feeds.
Every now and then the internet mode will drop a connection or suffer from lag, but that has not been a problem. The games are typically quite short, from a few minutes to ten. Of course, you might have a spaceteam that's whole lot better than ours :) The game works with up to 8 players.
I wholeheartedly recommend starting a meeting by a round of Spaceteam. After this, you have shared experience and topped out attention for whatever adventure awaits in the fantastic world of remote office work!
Game itself: 5 / 5
Remote play experience 5 / 5