Kevin C. Wong

Tabletop Simulator

Tabletop Simulator [/] This is a physics-based simulator for tabletop games, whether board games or miniatures or RPGs. It supports dice, cards, maps and figures. You can stack cards and tokens, fling dice and other objects, rotate and flip cards. Graphics are fairly good.

We've been playing Gloomhaven and after a couple of sessions there are pros and cons. The module has scripts to automate some things but it seems like scripts are a bit limited: you have to set up objects in certain places for the script to work and if the flow is different then a script fails for various reasons. But on the positive side you can skip the scripts and do things manually which allows you to cheat (which I do when I'm "GMing" a board game).

But because it's a physical object simulator the controls are clunky. ASWD to pan around, arrow keys to change viewing angle, click and drag to move objects, click and Q/E to rotate, click and F to flip, etc. Compared to physically playing a board game (and the comparison is inevitable because this is a physical world simulator) it's slow and sometimes frustrating. Also compare to a dedicated app which would be an idealized board and pieces without the table and physics engine; easier to use and probably better graphics.

This week we found out you also need a good connection. We were all getting disconnected so I think it was on the problem was on the host's end (you connect to TTS instance on host's machine and I think host sends all the graphic assets to clients). One person with an older computer had lots of lag issues (TTS seems rather graphics intensive; maybe there are graphics settings you can change to lower GPU usage). We were using Discord for voice chat and that kept working fine.

Creating your own module seems like a lot of work. You can buy modules for $5 to $20, or free, which is not bad. Worse for RPGs since you need to buy supplements separately (if you want to use the computer aids like character tracker and so forth).

Overall I'm unsure about TTS. On the plus side it's generic so you can play lots of different games. On the minus side it's generic so the gaming experience is always going to be subpar.