Tabletop Simulator

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

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

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.

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 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

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.

Check out 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

Vassal is open-source and good for doing 2d games:

http://www.vassalengine.org/

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

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.

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.

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

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 :)

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

Have you used TTS in VR yet? I wonder if that alleviates some of your concerns.

> 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.

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.

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.