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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 fo

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.
- nullsoldier 6y ago
  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 http://playtable.app
  - Zealotux 6y ago
    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.
themikesanto 6y ago
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.
nimih 6y ago
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 http://hanabi.live, which is spectacularly good, and frankly a better experience than real life.
- esrauch 6y ago
  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).
sjbrown 6y ago
I invite you to have a look at Togetherness Table https://github.com/sjbrown/togetherness 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
siweizzz 6y ago
Check out Turn Base (implement and play board games using a DSL): https://turn-base.com/ https://turn-base.com/ Here's an original game implemented using this system: https://turn-base.com/games/lobby/22/ 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.
hanrelan 6y ago
Check out https://screentop.gg/ https://screentop.gg/. It's web-based and 2D, so it sounds like it fits your use-case. 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 https://screentop.gg/learn/beginner-tutorial
aidenn0 6y ago
Vassal is open-source and good for doing 2d games: http://www.vassalengine.org/ http://www.vassalengine.org/
- canada_dry 6y ago
  +1 that linux is supported.
- ajsnigrutin 6y ago
  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... All in all, it was fun!
flamecoals 6y ago
I am probably a bit late for this thread, but check out our non-profit FOSS project: https://FreeBoardGames.org 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
teod 6y ago
I took at little stab at it earlier this year and made a very basic POC using PhaserJS [https://github.com/te0d/web-tabletop https://github.com/te0d/web-tabletop]. You can see what the code does at [https://bored.blue/ https://bored.blue/]. 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).
nullsoldier 6y ago
Howdy, I'm the developer of Playtable, http://playtable.app/ 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 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.
- aloisdg 6y ago
  Do you plan to open source it?
- paledot 6y ago
  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.
- MPSimmons 6y ago
  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/
saluk 6y ago
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.
burmer 6y ago
Vassal isn't a physics simulator like TTS, but it's a widely used board game engine.
readthenotes1 6y ago
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
kruczek 6y ago
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 :)

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.

nullsoldier 6y ago
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 http://playtable.app
- Zealotux 6y ago
  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.

themikesanto 6y ago

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.

nimih 6y ago

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 http://hanabi.live, which is spectacularly good, and frankly a better experience than real life.

esrauch 6y ago
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).

sjbrown 6y ago

I invite you to have a look at Togetherness Table https://github.com/sjbrown/togetherness 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

siweizzz 6y ago

Check out Turn Base (implement and play board games using a DSL): https://turn-base.com/ https://turn-base.com/ Here's an original game implemented using this system: https://turn-base.com/games/lobby/22/ 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.

hanrelan 6y ago

Check out https://screentop.gg/ https://screentop.gg/. It's web-based and 2D, so it sounds like it fits your use-case. 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 https://screentop.gg/learn/beginner-tutorial

aidenn0 6y ago

Vassal is open-source and good for doing 2d games: http://www.vassalengine.org/ http://www.vassalengine.org/

canada_dry 6y ago
+1 that linux is supported.
ajsnigrutin 6y ago
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... All in all, it was fun!

flamecoals 6y ago

I am probably a bit late for this thread, but check out our non-profit FOSS project: https://FreeBoardGames.org 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

teod 6y ago

I took at little stab at it earlier this year and made a very basic POC using PhaserJS [https://github.com/te0d/web-tabletop https://github.com/te0d/web-tabletop]. You can see what the code does at [https://bored.blue/ https://bored.blue/]. 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).

nullsoldier 6y ago

Howdy, I'm the developer of Playtable, http://playtable.app/ 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 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.

aloisdg 6y ago
Do you plan to open source it?
paledot 6y ago
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.
MPSimmons 6y ago
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/

saluk 6y ago

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.

burmer 6y ago

Vassal isn't a physics simulator like TTS, but it's a widely used board game engine.

readthenotes1 6y ago

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

kruczek 6y ago

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 :)