11 ms·

Tabletop Simulator

117 points by n3t 6y ago

ksaj 6y ago
I love the slick graphics in their promos. 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.
nodonut 6y ago
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.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  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).
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    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.
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      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.
exolymph 6y ago
My husband adores Tabletop Simulator for D&D, especially because you can import every model under the sun. He has little Dorito bags and tiny Shrek figures. Seriously, wide selection.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  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.
  - orpheansodality 6y ago
    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. [0] https://foundryvtt.com/ https://foundryvtt.com/
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      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.
MikeTheGreat 6y ago
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? :)
- redwoolf 6y ago
  Check out https://boardgamearena.com https://boardgamearena.com. They have an SDK.
  - captn3m0 6y ago
    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.
- Zealotux 6y ago
  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. https://bonfiretabletop.com 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.
Magodo 6y ago
If you want to buy it wait a couple of days for the steam sale coming up
- Talanes 6y ago
  Is this one of those games that's constantly on sale? I picked it up for five bucks on Steam just a few weeks ago.
  - remram 6y ago
    It seems to go on sale pretty often, but never as low as $5 in the US: https://steamdb.info/app/286160/ https://steamdb.info/app/286160/
    - Talanes 6y ago
      The price was more of a general estimate, I just knew I wouldn't have spent $10 on it.
mettamage 6y ago
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.
- Raphmedia 6y ago
  It's an entire different beast. In VR, you are "there" and simply pick up and move pieces instinctively with your hands.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  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.
- chaostheory 6y ago
  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.
pugio 6y ago
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!).
andjd 6y ago
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.
germinalphrase 6y ago
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.
Justsignedup 6y ago
We tried playing DnD using it. - 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.
- WilTimSon 6y ago
  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.
  - secabeen 6y ago
    Roll20 is great, but I'm really enjoying the community of mods and developers around FoundryVTT.
adamredwoods 6y ago
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.
- hadlock 6y ago
  Have you used TTS in VR yet? I wonder if that alleviates some of your concerns.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > 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.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  http://www.vassalengine.org/ http://www.vassalengine.org/
cableshaft 6y ago
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. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2217344915 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 https://cardboardedison.com/playtest-groups
- kovek 6y ago
  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.
  - cableshaft 6y ago
    Not that I'm aware of, at least. I pretty much have to run it on a separate laptop from Discord in order to not have slowdown issues on my laptop.
ehsankia 6y ago
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?
infamousjoeg 6y ago
I found this game to only be fun to play in VR (I have the Oculus Quest 2). On PC, it's hard to use KBAM as hands as adamredwoods said.
jfengel 6y ago
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.
- p1necone 6y ago
  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?
davidye 6y ago
Shameless plug: I created a free 2d web based tabletop app at https://screentop.gg https://screentop.gg that lets you put together a multiplayer board game without any coding.
gverrilla 6y ago
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.
- blue1 6y ago
  First thing to do when you buy a mac: buy a two-button mouse. For when you only have the trackpad, enable two-digit touch as secondary button.
bargle0 6y ago
TTS would be great if it were easier to develop modules for it. As it is, there’s no good way to keep your stuff in VCS and collaborate with others. I tried messing around with it a few months ago, but gave up when it looked like collaborating was going to be difficult.
chrxr 6y ago
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.
tchock23 6y ago
Really wish there was a native version of this for the Quest rather than having to link it to a PC.
intenscia 6y ago
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. https://store.steampowered.com/app/838410/Tabletop_Playground/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/838410/Tabletop_Playgroun...

117 points by n3t 6y ago

ksaj 6y ago

I love the slick graphics in their promos. 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.

nodonut 6y ago

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.

Jtsummers 6y ago
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).
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  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.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    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.

exolymph 6y ago

My husband adores Tabletop Simulator for D&D, especially because you can import every model under the sun. He has little Dorito bags and tiny Shrek figures. Seriously, wide selection.

StavrosK 6y ago
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.
- orpheansodality 6y ago
  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. [0] https://foundryvtt.com/ https://foundryvtt.com/
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    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.

MikeTheGreat 6y ago

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? :)

redwoolf 6y ago
Check out https://boardgamearena.com https://boardgamearena.com. They have an SDK.
- captn3m0 6y ago
  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.
Zealotux 6y ago
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. https://bonfiretabletop.com 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.

Magodo 6y ago

If you want to buy it wait a couple of days for the steam sale coming up

Talanes 6y ago
Is this one of those games that's constantly on sale? I picked it up for five bucks on Steam just a few weeks ago.
- remram 6y ago
  It seems to go on sale pretty often, but never as low as $5 in the US: https://steamdb.info/app/286160/ https://steamdb.info/app/286160/
  - Talanes 6y ago
    The price was more of a general estimate, I just knew I wouldn't have spent $10 on it.

mettamage 6y ago

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.

Raphmedia 6y ago
It's an entire different beast. In VR, you are "there" and simply pick up and move pieces instinctively with your hands.
vorpalhex 6y ago
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.
chaostheory 6y ago
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.

pugio 6y ago

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!).

andjd 6y ago

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.

germinalphrase 6y ago

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.

Justsignedup 6y ago

We tried playing DnD using it. - 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.

WilTimSon 6y ago
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.
- secabeen 6y ago
  Roll20 is great, but I'm really enjoying the community of mods and developers around FoundryVTT.

adamredwoods 6y ago

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.

hadlock 6y ago
Have you used TTS in VR yet? I wonder if that alleviates some of your concerns.
pessimizer 6y ago
> 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.
aidenn0 6y ago
http://www.vassalengine.org/ http://www.vassalengine.org/

cableshaft 6y ago

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. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2217344915 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 https://cardboardedison.com/playtest-groups

kovek 6y ago
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.
- cableshaft 6y ago
  Not that I'm aware of, at least. I pretty much have to run it on a separate laptop from Discord in order to not have slowdown issues on my laptop.

ehsankia 6y ago

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?

infamousjoeg 6y ago

I found this game to only be fun to play in VR (I have the Oculus Quest 2). On PC, it's hard to use KBAM as hands as adamredwoods said.

jfengel 6y ago

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.

p1necone 6y ago
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?

davidye 6y ago

Shameless plug: I created a free 2d web based tabletop app at https://screentop.gg https://screentop.gg that lets you put together a multiplayer board game without any coding.

gverrilla 6y ago

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.

blue1 6y ago
First thing to do when you buy a mac: buy a two-button mouse. For when you only have the trackpad, enable two-digit touch as secondary button.

bargle0 6y ago

TTS would be great if it were easier to develop modules for it. As it is, there’s no good way to keep your stuff in VCS and collaborate with others. I tried messing around with it a few months ago, but gave up when it looked like collaborating was going to be difficult.

chrxr 6y ago

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.

tchock23 6y ago

Really wish there was a native version of this for the Quest rather than having to link it to a PC.

intenscia 6y ago

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. https://store.steampowered.com/app/838410/Tabletop_Playground/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/838410/Tabletop_Playgroun...