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Tabletop Simulator

tabletopsimulator.com

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: Tabletop Simulator

#11

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…

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.

Re: Tabletop Simulator

#12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coul…

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.

Re: Tabletop Simulator

#13
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.

Re: Tabletop Simulator

#14
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!).

Re: Tabletop Simulator

#15

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.

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

Re: Tabletop Simulator

#16
post #6

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…

Check out https://boardgamearena.com . They have an SDK.

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.

Re: Tabletop Simulator

#17
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.

Re: Tabletop Simulator

#18

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.

Re: Tabletop Simulator

#19

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…

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.

Re: Tabletop Simulator

#20

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…

I invite you to have a look at Togetherness Table

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

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