If they ever wanted to do gamified card magic and card handling tutorials, I'd help with that. But I'm definitely not an art assets guy, so that seems to count me out of the game right from the start. I do have the algorithms down, just not the graphics. I think it could work really well on this sort of platform.
I'm a big fan of tabletop simulator-- you can play and create virtually any board game online. Really not much like it.
That said, it is probably the game which MOST needs a freemium pricing model. Convincing everyone you want to play with to drop $20 on a game can be a prohibitive hurdle. No problem for other gamers in your life, but non-gaming family/friends/co-workers...that's a huge lift.
I'd be way more eager to pay double, if it meant I was unlocking "host" abilities to start the game, while everyone else could join for free in an app/website.
On Steam there's a 4-pack for $50 or $60, that's what I'll be buying to share it with people who aren't 100% convinced yet. It's a small premium for me, but not unreasonable for something as useful as it. If they really like it, they can toss me $10 whenever we actually see each other again.
> I'd be way more eager to pay double, if it meant I was unlocking "host" abilities to start the game, while everyone else could join for free in an app/website.
Fantasy Grounds got me this way. I dropped the money so everyone else could just download the demo and join in the games that I host. Easily worth the cost to me considering I run a game every other Saturday right now (and trying to run additional games).
The problem is that you can only buy the 4-pack once; found that out the hard way when I wanted to provide a copy to more than 4 friends. Apparently, it's to suppress resellers buying multiple copies whenever it's on sale.
Ouch, good to know. Fortunately I haven't bought it even once yet so it's still available to me. It's still a good price if someone in the group is willing to make the purchase. Just have to rotate through people potentially.
On the flip side, we tried it, and it was a huge hassle for our DM to create levels every time, to the point where we couldn't meet as often because of how fiddly creating the levels was. On the players' side, it the UI was dog-slow and clunky as well, so we went back to Roll20.net, though that's not great either.
Check out Foundry VTT[0] -- I've been using it since release and so far it has been a much better experience than Roll20. Plus it has a pay-once-and-own-the-product-forever model, and you can easily self-host your own server.
That looks great, thanks! Our GM wanted us to use a VTT that was in development a few months ago (saw it on a reddit announcement), not sure if it's this one. I think his was 3D, but this looks great, thanks again.
I really want to love TTS, and I think that if I had experts to play with (to show me the ropes) then it would be a great game platform for boardgames.
I've found it very challenging to get started (to be fair, I was trying to start with HeroQuest - it's not complicated rules-wise, but there's a lot of pieces to move around). I think each game maker can make their own choices about how the UI should work so it's not clear what I should be looking for (in terms of UI widgets). Then they need to document how the game UI works which seems to be hit-or-miss depending on who wrote the mod.
For Heroquest, at least, it then seemed like I needed to spend a bunch of effort to get past the 3D aspects of the game in order to focus on the actual gameplay (which is fundamentally 2D).
At the end of the day it feels like trying to smash a 3D peg into a 2D round hole - I love the idea but in practice having a dedicated, 2D board game framework seems like it might be a better fit for board games.
What have you all found?
How did you get started?
How do you find good docs?
Is there a Boardgame Simulator out there that I'm missing? :)
Or freeboardgames.org, which uses boardgame.io under the hood - its all nice react components and a nice node.js stack. BGA uses a custom PHP framework, and Dojo JS (which is older than jQuery iirc).
BGA also has a licensing policy, which means BGA needs to figure out a license for a game prior to you working on it.
Mine! Unfortunately it's still in its very early stages (closed alpha) but let me know if you're interested in trying it out! The goal is to make it as accessible as possible, 2D only, approachable by novice, in-browser only.
I would actually love to meet more people in your situation, I myself was kind of fed-up with the current state of TTS, which are either too obscure/complex, or simply not performant enough.
Howdy, mine too. Looks like there are a lot of us making VTT's right now. is yours focused around board games, table top rpgs, or all of the above? http://playtable.app
We're focusing on RPGs mostly, and working on integrations with popular systems such as D&D. Playtable honestly looks very sweet, I love the 3D that still kind of feel like 2D, I didn't really enjoy the Tabletop Simulator 3D which feels too "clunky" for my taste.
I find TTS to be pretty intuitive, with a bit of a learning curve. It provides ways to quickly roll dice, shuffle/deal cards, etc, but beyond that it's mostly just a 3D space with a table for you to play board games in. Grab a rule book, set up the pieces, and get to playing.
If you want the software to set up the game for you and automate some of the aspects of playing it, yes, that requires someone to have taken the time to script out those interactions.
Some scripted games on the workshop are really impressive. Munchkin and Gloomhaven come to mind as games that have really great user made scripted interactions. The official DLC is pretty quality as well, such as Wingspan or Viticulture.
The big win of TTS in my experience is that it ends up being a lot easier to play board games with folks who are otherwise not big board game players and are not especially comfortable with computers: For people who play a lot of board games (and especially folks who do a lot of PBEM games, either via an engine like board game arena/vassal, a bespoke website like 18xx.games, or actual spreadsheets and email), the 3D interface ends up being a bit clumsy. For people who do not fit into that group, however, it's a lot easier for more experienced players to help you take your turn, explain what's going on, fix broken game states, rewind turns/actions, and implement the same on-the-fly shortcuts/simplifications/workarounds that organically crop up in casual/teaching environments in real life. Anecdotally, it's usually noticably easier for non-gamers to understand the interface of "it's a physics simulation, so just do what you'd do in real life, but by pointing and clicking" than a custom web/GUI interface, no matter how well thought-out or polished[0].
A corollary to this is that there's actually a reasonably high baseline for how good/bad a game can be on TTS: the ceiling on a good web or phone implementation of a game is very high, but a poorly designed GUI interface for a board game with bad scripting can easily become unplayable. On TTS, things usually are never worse than "well, there's no automation and we have to disable snap-to-grid, so we have to move things around by hand, just like you would in real life". Similarly, the amount of time you have to spend learning is bounded by the time it takes to learn the game IRL, whereas for GUI implementations of board games you usually have to learn the bespoke interface in addition to the board game itself. If your group likes to play a huge variety of games, this flexibility ends up being really valuable.
[0] The one notable exception I've seen for this is http://hanabi.live, which is spectacularly good, and frankly a better experience than real life.
I feel like "not especially comfortable with computers" must come with a pretty big weak definition. I've tried TTS a few times and as someone who otherwise is very comfortable with both computers AND board games I found the interface impossibly unusable since you have to memorize all sorts of arbitrary keys for flipping and pulling cards and so on.
I certainly found it much harder than either any physical or digital implementation that I had tried (but I assume there's some learning curve hump to get over where that wouldn't be true anymore).
Maybe that's not the right description. My tabletop group has a couple communally-owned steam accounts with only copies of TTS, so that folks' partners, friends, and family members who don't have a Steam account of their own (and don't play computer games at all, but are interested in joining in on a less-complex board game) can join in. Other than dealing with Steam's 2FA, the process of teaching and playing games with these sorts of guests goes pretty smoothly in the group's experience.
Admittedly, we tend to play games with a more euro-game-y slant, so typically the only interactions you need are to click-and-drag to move pieces, and perhaps `F' to flip a card or token over; if pieces need to be rotated to align correctly, it's pretty easy for more experienced players to worry about that if someone is having trouble with the controls. If the games you like to play require more complicated types of interaction, I could definitely see that being a stumbling block, since the interface seems to get exponentially clunkier as the number of distinct bits you need to deal with increases. Playing Bus is a joy, for instance, but I imagine Arkham Horror is absolutely miserable.
edit: To be clear, this is all anecdotal, and TTS has a bunch of warts I don't want to gloss over, but I've been utilizing it heavily since the start of Covid quarantine, and overall I think it's been a pretty positive experience. On whole, although I like platforms like Board Game Arena and software like Vassal, TTS has proven to be better (for my group of friends!) in terms of accommodating a wider variety of people and wider variety of games.
Check out Turn Base (implement and play board games using a DSL): https://turn-base.com/
Here's an original game implemented using this system: https://turn-base.com/games/lobby/22/ (Buy cards to summon and move chess pieces in a chess game) You'll need to grab a friend to play (no AI). Ping me in discord if the game doesn't make sense.
It's a bit ugly, it's a bit slow, but holy fuck, with a few tiny edits of the carcassone module + working from home, we wasted so many hours and built a map, probably larger than an average room...
It has a hardcoded background and limited token options, but you can see it live update token positions between the users connected. I actually decided to take another look at it yesterday and I'd like to add some preset game options. And very importantly, add persistence (right now the websocket server keeps each table's state only in memory).
Howdy, I'm the developer of Playtable, http://playtable.app/ and I'm really intersted in tackling the usability aspect you are talking about.
TTS is one of the worst systems for usability. It's clunky, runs very slow, and because the interface is not standard UI, it's just programmer game engine UI it comes off as very very hard to use. Currently, the best product out there is Tabletopia in terms of usability, https://tabletopia.com I recommend you give it a try.
On that front, I'm very aggressively attempting to tackle this part of the market because even Tabletopia has major issues with usability in places. Developers often get confused and think these systems require massive user and permissioning systems, and lots of interaction structure, which is a wrong assumption. Turns out people just want to play games. To that I say, stop building token locking systems into engines, stop building complex joining systems!
Playtable requires no account, merely requires you to give a link to your friends to join. The problem is we're only tackling D&D and tabletop RPGs at the moment but I hope we'll expand out to other systems later.
Looks promising! I'm looking forward to giving it a try. My problem with Roll20 and Astral isn't that they don't have enough features, it's that they have lots of features and really want me to use them, when all I want to do is drag tokens around on a grid my players can see while we use pen and paper for the rest.
This kind of thing makes me yearn for a solution that does this in VR. I am not a dragonborn, nor am I a wizard or any other fantastic being from D&D, but I would LOVE to sit around a virtual table, in a torch lit dungeon, going through adventures with a dungeonmaster guiding my fellow players through a quest.
Can you imagine something like Risk, but with military generals?
Do you think you would ever have the resources to do something like that/
> This kind of thing makes me yearn for a solution that does this in VR.
I would absolutely love a VR take on this. A year or so ago, I figured I could manage running games in TTS as a VR player while everyone else just played. Turns out that TTS in VR is far and away less usable than TTS normally is. Just feels like they checked a box to enable VR support in Unity and left it at that. Fuzzy interface that made everything hard to read, clunky VR controls, and basically zero assists. One wrong move and you accidentally clear the whole table. It made TTS's regular controls seem nice, that's how bad it was.
Where TTS excels is for designers. It's super quick to change rules in the middle of the game, import new components, make small alterations, you name it. You can open a new table and just start experimenting with the components they give you, and move on to importing new assets when you are ready. And you don't need to code up a ui for it.
This freedom is good for tabletop roleplaying as well, though if you are working within an established ruleset that has an implementation on roll20 or fantasygrounds those give the gm more out of the box automation tools.
I've played gloomhaven on it a few times. There's a plug-in that sets everything up for each scenario. It's not quite as easy as in person gloomhaven+gloomhaven helper, but it's pretty close
I am probably a bit late for this thread, but check out our non-profit FOSS project: https://FreeBoardGames.org
It is built with boardgame.io and react/next, and we have a growing community! We have a special focus on making sure our games work on mobile too
I think the most important thing to keep in mind when playing TTS is the need to learn three things simultaneously:
- how to use TTS,
- what are the rules of the game you want to play,
- how those rules are applied in the specific TTS game/mod you use.
The first thing need to be learnt only once, and honestly there's not much to learn. All one needs is:
- WASD/click mouse - scroll
- F - flip
- R - shuffle
- left click - pick/drop
These cover 99% of all use cases.
But then learning rules of a pariticular game and learning how those are applied - these need to be learnt each time when starting a new mod. One way to mitigate this is playing with people who already have experience with a particular mod.
When starting with a new mod by yourself, first it's important to determine how much scripted it is. Some mods are raw physic playgrounds with components from the game, while others are scripted to automate and simplify gameplay. I think those raw mods are easier to get started, because you basically only need to know rules of the game itself and do everything manually same way you'd do when playing actual board game. On the other hand, once you get to know the range of scripts in a scripted mod, it's much easier to play the mod - it's often more like a computer game, where things happen automatically.
Because these mods are all independent, so it's often difficult or impossible to find any documentation about scripts used by the mod. Often figuring that out is basically trail-and-error, which is unfortunate. There are some which provide written instructions though.
I've played Twilight Imperium, Gloomhaven and Gaia Project and I found all of them very enjoyoable (once I learned how to play them). PM me and maybe we can setup a game :)
Can anyone chime in how they experience Tabletop Simulator with a VR headset? I've played the normal Tabletop Simulator and am wondering if it gets a bit easier with picking up models and so on when using a VR headset.
You can be a player, or a pawn on the board. You have grip physics to interact with pieces, with the ability to scale yourself and the pieces.
I imagine it would be awkward unless all the players were in VR together since it's a very different interface, but I haven't actually tried playing a game with it.
It's a much better experience in VR. Even though there's still a learning curve, it's less annoying vs the game being stuck inside a box. The problem is that VR doesn't have a big player base yet
A 3D representation of a board game doesn't make sense to me if it's constrained to a boxed screen.
The most compelling thing about TTS (for me), is this heavily scriptable (with Lua) 3d physics-enabled environment. I started playing Twilight Imperium 4 on TTS, and then got sucked in when I realized I could right click on any piece and start attaching script behaviors. I even started playing around with Unity to import custom pieces and animations (made a Death Star Laser animation for TI 4's "War Sun" unit).
It's one of those environments you can quickly drop into a Flow state for – visible results, tight feedback loop, endless possibility for creativity (and time sink!).
As a player, not a developer, the usability of TTS for boardgames is heavily dependent on how much effort the developer put into the mod. Good ones have scripts and snap-points that minimize the difficulty of playing in a 3d sandbox environment. More minimal mods can be very difficult to enjoy. If you're having issues, I would recommend starting with a well scripted game.
Tried to like TTS, but with nontechnical friends learning the basic functions and interactions (on top of learning the board game) made it a painful experience.
- the number of objects drastically affects input lag. So easy with card placeholders and mods to get into a horrible performance zone where even throwing a dice is lagy.
- It isn't super comfortable
- Not as good as roll20.com even with roll20's limited features, the effort required is 20x lower.
- So easy to get into weird physics interactions. How many times did we try to move a piece, be 1px off, and half the board goes flying.
- very space limited. there's no comfortable place to set up your stuff, just a tiny spot on the side of your player. Very limiting.
Overall I understand why most these problems are not easily solvable, but it isn't a great experience. Good for simple board games, not good for something really complex.
I found Roll20 to be quite good, all things considered. Few online spaces will readily replace the actual tabletop experience but it was fun and convenient for a few games. Perhaps now that we've all experienced isolation from the world, someone will rise to the task to make a better version.
Not a fan. Please do NOT simulate this type of gaming when the platform experience is vastly different: human hands versus a touchpad (mouse). Why do I need a 3d view?
We played a TTS game where we needed to pay coins, make change, and take resources each turn. We tried to stack the coins and they would not stack. We tried to take multiple resources and it would not let us, so we took them one-by-one. A painful experience.
We use BoardGameArena, Yucata, and Boiteajeux. All which have interface problems, but vastly superior for speed.
One of my pet projects is to make an open source, self-hosting, modular tabletop gaming platform, so this way ANYONE can write a 'module' and share it, and leave the hosting up to the individuals.
> One of my pet projects is to make an open source, self-hosting, modular tabletop gaming platform, so this way ANYONE can write a 'module' and share it, and leave the hosting up to the individuals.
Me, too. I think the fact that game components are physical objects that are rested upon each other limits what can be expressed in a game enough that you could possibly boil them down to a markup language. Then have a single player "host" the game by running a server, and everyone else can connect to that player securely, with access granted only to what the rules would allow them to "view."
I have a fantasy about peer-to-peer boardgaming, with everybody's hand and whatever is hidden behind their player screen on their phone, tablet or laptop. Something that would work as well with everybody in the room together (have a widescreen logged in as an observer of the board) as it does with players on opposite sides of the world.
For people in the board game industry, Tabletop Simulator has become invaluable during the pandemic. A ton of designers have figured out how to use TTS enough to get their prototypes working in here and then have online virtual playtest nights using it. Also publishers can also use it to playtest games, or to see a virtual pitch.
TTS is actually very powerful once you dig into it. I was annoyed by it at first, but once I sat down and watched some videos, sat in on other people's playtests and gotten ideas for things I can do in my own prototypes, I've discovered just how powerful it is. I haven't dug into the scripting aspect of it yet, but I will before too much longer.
I'm actually going to use it for pitching one of my games to publishers during an event next weekend (a simple abstract game called Cake Walk, I actually have it up on the Steam Workshop so anyone can try it). It's at the link below if you own TTS and you're curious.
I know there's also Tabletopia, which is free up front, but that requires you to pay a monthly fee if you want to set up more than one game, and if you're a designer like me, I've got like 10 active prototypes at any given time. It's still good for people running Kickstarters to let people try out their game during a campaign though.
If any of you own this and like the idea of playtesting games in progress, there's a group that happens pretty much every day of the week. Most meet via Discord, since it's more stable for audio and will stay up even when switching servers. Here's a list below if anyone is interested. I've mostly stuck with the Chicago group, but you might see me in the others at some point:
Is there any way to improve TTS’s performance? My laptop’s fan goes off when running it. I wish they could provide an option do so a simpler rendering. Otherwise it requires some good hardware to run it nicely.
I'm curious how they've manage to bypass copyright issues so far and how well they'll do long term. So much of the game relies on distributing copyrighted content in the workshop. I guess they do have paid official DLCs but does anyone use those?
It's nice to read that they've got anti-griefing tools built into the software. The web has been around too long for developers to not take social interactions into account. Perfect solutions don't exist but if you do nothing you're going to get nailed very quickly, at a time you'd rather be developing the game than playing catchup with setting up the community.
I've only ever used Tabletop Sim with the same group of friends that I play physical board games with. I'm not sure it's actually common to use this with randos that might try to grief?
Shameless plug: I created a free 2d web based tabletop app at https://screentop.gg that lets you put together a multiplayer board game without any coding.
there are great scripted games free available at workshop. Played with my group in the last months: Photosynthesis, Zombicide, Catan, Sheriff, Azul and Splendor.
There's def a learning curve and some people suffer a bit, but overall now that everybody can use TAB to indicate something on the board, take single card vs all cards on deck, hand mechanics, blindfold, etc, it's all very smooth. My brother is not having the best time because he's on a mac with a single button mouse (?) but apart from that it's alright for everybody.
We bought packs of 4 with good prices and everybody is very satisfied. Age 30's.
TTS is great for 40k, although moving a large amount of pieces can be a pain. There are a huge amount of model scans available, and the community has put an immense amount of effort into building battlefields. I have mixed feelings about the morality of getting this stuff for free. I say mixed because the price of actual GW models is criminal. However, I don't think this takes much profit from GW. It certainly hasn't prevented me from wanting to paint models and play in person. But with that currently being impossible, TTS and Warhammer Total War are my only outlets.
We are publishing an alternative to TTS called Tabletop Playground. It’s made in UE4, so better fidelity and performance more finely tuned, with less floaty physics. Also aims to offer a more powerful in-game editor for novices and pros alike.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadIf they ever wanted to do gamified card magic and card handling tutorials, I'd help with that. But I'm definitely not an art assets guy, so that seems to count me out of the game right from the start. I do have the algorithms down, just not the graphics. I think it could work really well on this sort of platform.
That said, it is probably the game which MOST needs a freemium pricing model. Convincing everyone you want to play with to drop $20 on a game can be a prohibitive hurdle. No problem for other gamers in your life, but non-gaming family/friends/co-workers...that's a huge lift.
I'd be way more eager to pay double, if it meant I was unlocking "host" abilities to start the game, while everyone else could join for free in an app/website.
> I'd be way more eager to pay double, if it meant I was unlocking "host" abilities to start the game, while everyone else could join for free in an app/website.
Fantasy Grounds got me this way. I dropped the money so everyone else could just download the demo and join in the games that I host. Easily worth the cost to me considering I run a game every other Saturday right now (and trying to run additional games).
He has little Dorito bags and tiny Shrek figures. Seriously, wide selection.
[0] https://foundryvtt.com/
I've found it very challenging to get started (to be fair, I was trying to start with HeroQuest - it's not complicated rules-wise, but there's a lot of pieces to move around). I think each game maker can make their own choices about how the UI should work so it's not clear what I should be looking for (in terms of UI widgets). Then they need to document how the game UI works which seems to be hit-or-miss depending on who wrote the mod.
For Heroquest, at least, it then seemed like I needed to spend a bunch of effort to get past the 3D aspects of the game in order to focus on the actual gameplay (which is fundamentally 2D).
At the end of the day it feels like trying to smash a 3D peg into a 2D round hole - I love the idea but in practice having a dedicated, 2D board game framework seems like it might be a better fit for board games.
What have you all found?
How did you get started?
How do you find good docs?
Is there a Boardgame Simulator out there that I'm missing? :)
BGA also has a licensing policy, which means BGA needs to figure out a license for a game prior to you working on it.
https://bonfiretabletop.com
I would actually love to meet more people in your situation, I myself was kind of fed-up with the current state of TTS, which are either too obscure/complex, or simply not performant enough.
If you want the software to set up the game for you and automate some of the aspects of playing it, yes, that requires someone to have taken the time to script out those interactions.
Some scripted games on the workshop are really impressive. Munchkin and Gloomhaven come to mind as games that have really great user made scripted interactions. The official DLC is pretty quality as well, such as Wingspan or Viticulture.
A corollary to this is that there's actually a reasonably high baseline for how good/bad a game can be on TTS: the ceiling on a good web or phone implementation of a game is very high, but a poorly designed GUI interface for a board game with bad scripting can easily become unplayable. On TTS, things usually are never worse than "well, there's no automation and we have to disable snap-to-grid, so we have to move things around by hand, just like you would in real life". Similarly, the amount of time you have to spend learning is bounded by the time it takes to learn the game IRL, whereas for GUI implementations of board games you usually have to learn the bespoke interface in addition to the board game itself. If your group likes to play a huge variety of games, this flexibility ends up being really valuable.
[0] The one notable exception I've seen for this is http://hanabi.live, which is spectacularly good, and frankly a better experience than real life.
I certainly found it much harder than either any physical or digital implementation that I had tried (but I assume there's some learning curve hump to get over where that wouldn't be true anymore).
Admittedly, we tend to play games with a more euro-game-y slant, so typically the only interactions you need are to click-and-drag to move pieces, and perhaps `F' to flip a card or token over; if pieces need to be rotated to align correctly, it's pretty easy for more experienced players to worry about that if someone is having trouble with the controls. If the games you like to play require more complicated types of interaction, I could definitely see that being a stumbling block, since the interface seems to get exponentially clunkier as the number of distinct bits you need to deal with increases. Playing Bus is a joy, for instance, but I imagine Arkham Horror is absolutely miserable.
edit: To be clear, this is all anecdotal, and TTS has a bunch of warts I don't want to gloss over, but I've been utilizing it heavily since the start of Covid quarantine, and overall I think it's been a pretty positive experience. On whole, although I like platforms like Board Game Arena and software like Vassal, TTS has proven to be better (for my group of friends!) in terms of accommodating a wider variety of people and wider variety of games.
https://github.com/sjbrown/togetherness
It's all HTML, SVG, and JS. No JS framework, either, just straight-up JS. Super easy to get started
Here's an original game implemented using this system: https://turn-base.com/games/lobby/22/ (Buy cards to summon and move chess pieces in a chess game) You'll need to grab a friend to play (no AI). Ping me in discord if the game doesn't make sense.
The creator also has a discord server where he actively answers questions if you get stuck or have feature requests.
There's a beginner tutorial here: https://screentop.gg/learn/beginner-tutorial
http://www.vassalengine.org/
All in all, it was fun!
It has a hardcoded background and limited token options, but you can see it live update token positions between the users connected. I actually decided to take another look at it yesterday and I'd like to add some preset game options. And very importantly, add persistence (right now the websocket server keeps each table's state only in memory).
TTS is one of the worst systems for usability. It's clunky, runs very slow, and because the interface is not standard UI, it's just programmer game engine UI it comes off as very very hard to use. Currently, the best product out there is Tabletopia in terms of usability, https://tabletopia.com I recommend you give it a try.
On that front, I'm very aggressively attempting to tackle this part of the market because even Tabletopia has major issues with usability in places. Developers often get confused and think these systems require massive user and permissioning systems, and lots of interaction structure, which is a wrong assumption. Turns out people just want to play games. To that I say, stop building token locking systems into engines, stop building complex joining systems!
Playtable requires no account, merely requires you to give a link to your friends to join. The problem is we're only tackling D&D and tabletop RPGs at the moment but I hope we'll expand out to other systems later.
Can you imagine something like Risk, but with military generals?
Do you think you would ever have the resources to do something like that/
I would absolutely love a VR take on this. A year or so ago, I figured I could manage running games in TTS as a VR player while everyone else just played. Turns out that TTS in VR is far and away less usable than TTS normally is. Just feels like they checked a box to enable VR support in Unity and left it at that. Fuzzy interface that made everything hard to read, clunky VR controls, and basically zero assists. One wrong move and you accidentally clear the whole table. It made TTS's regular controls seem nice, that's how bad it was.
It started out as a VR project and while most people use it on a screen now, VR usability has always been part of the design.
This freedom is good for tabletop roleplaying as well, though if you are working within an established ruleset that has an implementation on roll20 or fantasygrounds those give the gm more out of the box automation tools.
- how to use TTS,
- what are the rules of the game you want to play,
- how those rules are applied in the specific TTS game/mod you use.
The first thing need to be learnt only once, and honestly there's not much to learn. All one needs is:
- WASD/click mouse - scroll
- F - flip
- R - shuffle
- left click - pick/drop
These cover 99% of all use cases.
But then learning rules of a pariticular game and learning how those are applied - these need to be learnt each time when starting a new mod. One way to mitigate this is playing with people who already have experience with a particular mod.
When starting with a new mod by yourself, first it's important to determine how much scripted it is. Some mods are raw physic playgrounds with components from the game, while others are scripted to automate and simplify gameplay. I think those raw mods are easier to get started, because you basically only need to know rules of the game itself and do everything manually same way you'd do when playing actual board game. On the other hand, once you get to know the range of scripts in a scripted mod, it's much easier to play the mod - it's often more like a computer game, where things happen automatically.
Because these mods are all independent, so it's often difficult or impossible to find any documentation about scripts used by the mod. Often figuring that out is basically trail-and-error, which is unfortunate. There are some which provide written instructions though.
I've played Twilight Imperium, Gloomhaven and Gaia Project and I found all of them very enjoyoable (once I learned how to play them). PM me and maybe we can setup a game :)
I imagine it would be awkward unless all the players were in VR together since it's a very different interface, but I haven't actually tried playing a game with it.
A 3D representation of a board game doesn't make sense to me if it's constrained to a boxed screen.
It's one of those environments you can quickly drop into a Flow state for – visible results, tight feedback loop, endless possibility for creativity (and time sink!).
- the number of objects drastically affects input lag. So easy with card placeholders and mods to get into a horrible performance zone where even throwing a dice is lagy.
- It isn't super comfortable
- Not as good as roll20.com even with roll20's limited features, the effort required is 20x lower.
- So easy to get into weird physics interactions. How many times did we try to move a piece, be 1px off, and half the board goes flying.
- very space limited. there's no comfortable place to set up your stuff, just a tiny spot on the side of your player. Very limiting.
Overall I understand why most these problems are not easily solvable, but it isn't a great experience. Good for simple board games, not good for something really complex.
We played a TTS game where we needed to pay coins, make change, and take resources each turn. We tried to stack the coins and they would not stack. We tried to take multiple resources and it would not let us, so we took them one-by-one. A painful experience.
We use BoardGameArena, Yucata, and Boiteajeux. All which have interface problems, but vastly superior for speed.
One of my pet projects is to make an open source, self-hosting, modular tabletop gaming platform, so this way ANYONE can write a 'module' and share it, and leave the hosting up to the individuals.
Me, too. I think the fact that game components are physical objects that are rested upon each other limits what can be expressed in a game enough that you could possibly boil them down to a markup language. Then have a single player "host" the game by running a server, and everyone else can connect to that player securely, with access granted only to what the rules would allow them to "view."
I have a fantasy about peer-to-peer boardgaming, with everybody's hand and whatever is hidden behind their player screen on their phone, tablet or laptop. Something that would work as well with everybody in the room together (have a widescreen logged in as an observer of the board) as it does with players on opposite sides of the world.
TTS is actually very powerful once you dig into it. I was annoyed by it at first, but once I sat down and watched some videos, sat in on other people's playtests and gotten ideas for things I can do in my own prototypes, I've discovered just how powerful it is. I haven't dug into the scripting aspect of it yet, but I will before too much longer.
I'm actually going to use it for pitching one of my games to publishers during an event next weekend (a simple abstract game called Cake Walk, I actually have it up on the Steam Workshop so anyone can try it). It's at the link below if you own TTS and you're curious.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=22173...
I know there's also Tabletopia, which is free up front, but that requires you to pay a monthly fee if you want to set up more than one game, and if you're a designer like me, I've got like 10 active prototypes at any given time. It's still good for people running Kickstarters to let people try out their game during a campaign though.
If any of you own this and like the idea of playtesting games in progress, there's a group that happens pretty much every day of the week. Most meet via Discord, since it's more stable for audio and will stay up even when switching servers. Here's a list below if anyone is interested. I've mostly stuck with the Chicago group, but you might see me in the others at some point:
https://cardboardedison.com/playtest-groups
For when you only have the trackpad, enable two-digit touch as secondary button.
I tried messing around with it a few months ago, but gave up when it looked like collaborating was going to be difficult.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/838410/Tabletop_Playgroun...