I have a group of people who play boardgames in a turned based fashion over at boardgamearena. This solves the flakiness issue. The lack of direct social interaction is then made slightly better by having a chat channel where we chat about ongoing games.

We've been having ongoing games (around 2 going at every one time) since about a year now I think.

Still do in person games as well, but this at least keeps that group going through in-perwon drought periods.