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Heyho!
The game does not support local multiplayer. You can play from several computers but not from the same version. The decision-making requires privacy unless in a team session, and even then there is a lot of back and forth on quick decisions. Considering the price, we did not see much reason to pursue local coop which would still mess up the player experience while saving just a few bucks.
What about local co-op for Gremlins Autamotons? I'd love to play this with the GF on the couch.
I have to be frank: the chances are very, very low.
The same functionality ("play with a friend against the other team, human or AI") is already available in Gremlins, Inc.
What the hotseat would change, is allow to replicate the existing functionality with fewer items of hardware (1 computer instead of 2). We feel that the benefits would be not comparable to the effort required, and that we have other features in the pipeline that would yield biggest impact across the player base.
Sorry about that!
...not only that, but how would you handle selection of Misfortunes? then everyone will see the contents of the MF deck every time anyone opens it to choose one.
or how do you handle player conflicts?
or how do you handle back-and-forth when offering someone a chance to do something like "pay $50 or pass this card?"
the box of potential UI issues is quite big...
I wish to play with friends on my living room ith the steam link and 4 xbox controller but this game doesn't devellopped for this , so do i need to bring 4 PC 4 Steam link and play on each walls of my living room ?
I don't care about "LAN multiplayer" but Like a Monopoly where we can play with a 1 controller and share it at each turn .
Does you think about it could be possible on Gremlins inc and vs automatons?
For a number of reasons (there are several forum threads with more details), Gremlins, Inc. is not going to work well in a hotseat mode. The best way to play is for each player to have their own screen and to make sure that other players cannot see it, as exposing one's cards would mess things up (and in team mode, you can see your team mate's cards on your own screen anyway).
There are other features that are more important and push lootboxes harder, like funneling players into timer-enforced Ranked. I've tried that, and the lack of playerbase combined with certain specific players being the only game in town night after night is burning that mode for me quickly. Play styles are easy enough to identify, so a typical game involves one of us going all-in on the other while the low ranked bystanders in the room profit. Because of MMR-based matchmaking, there's no way I can queue dodge this, nor any way to disincentivise either of us from going all-in on the other skilled player in the room. It isn't rule breaking either.
So yeah. Play with really stupid AI or buy a lot of computing devices and copies of Gremlins. Those are your main options.
I'd love to find out about the digital board games that support hotseat multiplayer and that would have mechanics similar to Gremlins, Inc.
I'm especially curious about what happens in stations like this:
* player A checks player C's hand for possible criminal cards
* player C loses 2 cards, goes to Jail
* player B gets the turn, passes Plant without stopping, then searches player A's hand for Courthouse cards and finds none
* player C's turn begins
We now have player C who had 2 cards replaced, and changed location. In a regular multiplayer game, she would be intensely analysing the 2 new cards and the context of new location where she is transported, to prepare for her turn.
In a hotseat multiplayer, she won't even see which cards she lost – because at the time when she lost them, player A's cards were on the screen, and she would be not allowed to see the events.
At the same time, neither player A nor player C will see that player B just passed the Plant without stopping (a valuable information matched with funds or cards). And player C won't even know that player A's hand was searched, and that player A had no Courthouse cards there.
There is a lot of context that happens at every player's turn, that is essential to decision making of all the other players. The skill of winning in this game is the skill of reading the intentions of others. Where did that player go? Why did she not do the action that seems rational here? Who searched whom? Who stopped on Income on the way to Inferno instead of turning north to the Casino? Etc.
To implement this in a hotseat environment would require telling everyone to just look away, and then look back, and then look away again, multiple times during each round. Which in a 60-minute session would result in two hour torture.
Less than 50% of sessions in Gremlins, Inc. (roughly 1,000 sessions each day) happen in ranked multiplayer mode. You're making assumptions based on your own experience, but this is not what the data shows. There are different ways to play this game, and different players have fun in different formats. We don't lock any gameplay mechanics behind paywalls, the game is the same for everyone, so it doesn't make a difference to us whether someone is playing online, offline, in a custom session or in a multiplayer session. We're looking at a variety of play styles and we balance them based on the actual data of how people play.
You're also assuming that most of the skill-based decision making is a concern to local players. Even among the online community, the majority of players aren't really using these tools to their intended benefit - bad players outnumber the good. In a local setting, you're often playing with friends/family/kids that have little to no exposure to competitive gaming. Neutering some of the skill-based, real-time decision making isn't a big loss for these groups. Its about having a social experience, not seeing who is the best player at the table.
I am making assumptions, but in turn you're assuming that when I say "funneling players into Ranked", I should count the rooms which are private (which a new player cannot join) and the rooms with a minimum session count to join (which a new player cannot join) and the singleplayer/tutorial rooms (which are still online, but obviously cannot be joined). Those rooms are statistical noise, irrelevant except to the players contained in those rooms.
A typical lobby on the Amsterdam server during the hours I play consists of a Ranked queue that typically takes ~5-40m to pop (speaking from personal experience at the 115-120 mmr range of the spectrum), and typically zero public rooms open during that queue, sometimes one room. If I look at games in progress, typically 2-5 Ranked games and a similar (but usually smaller) number of private games.
Hotseat is a different meta, there's no doubting that. But so is a meta where Chaos Cards are disabled. So is a meta where the goal is 20* instead of 30*, or a meta played on map #2, or a meta without public knowledge of the top Misfortune, or a meta based on 2v2v2.
When asking specifically for hotseat games that are in the "board game" genre that also feature frequent use of relevant private information and exist in the digital format...yeah, not many of those exist, but I can remove the hotseat qualifier and say the same thing. Its a niche genre.
I'm more of a champion for LAN gaming than for Hotseat gaming, because I've taken the time and money to ensure everyone in the house has either a Desktop PC (myself, older son), Laptop (wife), or a GPD Win (younger son). Time consumption is a major drawback of Hotseat gaming, but when its your only option, you make do. Hotseat for me typically means 4X games (Civ/AoW/etc), so I cannot speak to recent experience with hotseat board gaming except to say that Risk II (Microprose) saw a ton of play in Hotseat and in LAN forms during my college years. A shame that its DRM made it unsupported by Windows 10.
Or you have something like Lords of Waterdeep, where you can turn on play recap. So when a player's turn starts, they get a quick recap of what everyone else did since their last play (so they'd see that A checked C's hand, C went to jail and B passed the Plant.
Then they'd be fully informed for their turn.
My wife and I (and our friends when we hang out) will often play Hotseat games like Talisman, Lords of Waterdeep, The Witcher, etc together. There's plenty of such games out there. I don't see why Gremlins couldn't do the same.
I mean, I got this game through the Humble Bundle. I wouldn't have bothered buying it otherwise, because there's no hotseat. That's one of the main selling points for most digital board games. Basically the ability to play all these great board games without needing to set up an actual board and everything. It's why a lot of board game companies are putting out digital versions these days, because they know it's easy money.