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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.

Do you plan to open source it?

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.

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/

> This kind of thing makes me yearn for a solution that does this in VR.

I would absolutely love a VR take on this. A year or so ago, I figured I could manage running games in TTS as a VR player while everyone else just played. Turns out that TTS in VR is far and away less usable than TTS normally is. Just feels like they checked a box to enable VR support in Unity and left it at that. Fuzzy interface that made everything hard to read, clunky VR controls, and basically zero assists. One wrong move and you accidentally clear the whole table. It made TTS's regular controls seem nice, that's how bad it was.

You might enjoy Tabletop Playground: https://tabletop-playground.com (I'm the developer).

It started out as a VR project and while most people use it on a screen now, VR usability has always been part of the design.

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.

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

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.

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 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).

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.

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/

+1 that linux is supported.

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!

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.

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.

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 :)

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).

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.

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.

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 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

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

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