4 ms·

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 no

by 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).
- nimih 6y ago
  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.

by nimih 6y ago

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).

nimih 6y ago
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.