I have already written more comments here than I ever did on reddit. I want lemmy to succeed and it needs even us lurkers to do that. It ain’t much–but I am commenting ;)

Over several iterations the Spirit Island app became good enough. However, as much as I love the game, it is immensely difficult to play in digital. Even when on my large monitor, I cannot show everything at the same time and I need to switch between maps and cards and I find it makes for much added difficulty. I have stopped playing the digital version. I have not played Scythe enough to be able to say anything about that app.

It‘s not just about the data—which is bad enough but as you said they could just write a crawler to get at it. The question is why would they want to federate and why now? Meta being Meta the most likely reasons are terrible for the fediverse and it reminds me very much of Google and xmpp. I saw a really good writeup on this yesterday: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

• Railroad Ink and other roll and write games might work.
• The tiles from Kingdomino are quite thick and shouldn’t fly away at a slight breeze.
• Trick Taking games may work well, I have played lots of Skat outside way back when
• Kakerlakensalat and Dodelido don‘t take up a lot of space and worked well for us recently