Tabletop Simulator just left early access for a full release on Steam.
It’s the kind of thing that sounds really silly and unnecessary. You might think “A multiplayer physics sandbox for playing board games? There’s no way that would be fun.” But, it actually works, and it works well. It’s not perfect, the controls take about fifteen minutes to get used to, and there’s plenty of room for improvement, but by golly it really does come close to approximating the feel of playing a physical board game. It’s not scripted at all, you just get a bunch of pieces and have to manipulate them as you would playing the real thing. I played a game of Hellas with a friend. He placed a tile in an illegal spot and we didn’t notice until it was too late to go back and fix it, so we just kept going. Pretty much how things would have played out in meatspace.
The DLC plan is less than encouraging, but there’s already a ton of free stuff on the workshop. It’s not clear exactly how vigorously companies are going to get copies of their stuff DMCA’d, but it’s pretty clear there’s going to be plenty of decent content freely available.
For anyone who wants to play board games but feels restricted by real world logistics, I strongly recommend giving it a try.
I’m curious to see how workshop recreations of copyrighted games go. By just allowing the infrastructure and anything-goes modding, we could have a virtual recreation of just about any table game without any compensation to the copyright holders. It makes me wonder if this reaches a level that would draw the attention of those companies and make them take legal action. Obviously the game is more appealing if the modding/content creation is unhindered.
Is there voice chat? Any sort of video chat? Avatars? Floating hands? Anything of the sort? I was wondering if it attempts to represent the other players in some way to create the illusion of a virtual space.
Exactly what sorts of objects can you deal with, and how can you manipulate them? Does it allow for rolling dice (I presume so), and can it do non-cubical dice? How about cards? Can each player have a hand of cards that only they can see? Can you see the backs of other players’ cards, so you can (for instance) know that they’re re-arranging them in their hand (without knowing what arrangement they’re putting them into)? If a player draws a card and then immediately plays a card from their hand, can you tell if it’s the same one? Can a player look at a face-down card on the table?
This already exists in a program called VASSAL, which is essentially a 2D PBEM precursor to this program. There are well over a thousand games. I have no idea what the legal status of the program is, but the modules are all hosted on the VASSAL site itself, so I’m going to guess they haven’t run into trouble.
Now, VASSAL is also free and open-source and isn’t being run through Steam, so I imagine things will work out differently for Tabletop Simulator.
A lot of mods get taken off the workshop via DMCA requests. It remains to be seen which companies will be particularly vigilant about having mods taken down faster than they get put up.
It’s definitely not perfect, but it all works a lot better than I had imagined it would.
No voice chat or avatars. But honestly, Skype or Google Hangouts does that better than any in game system. When I play pretty much any game with friends we almost always use one of those rather than whatever the built it system is. You can see the other players’ pointers and each player has a reserved area for a hand of cards, which you can see being manipulated.
The objects are generally either cards or generic models. Cards can be stacked, dealt, flipped, shuffled and otherwise manipulated normally. Generic models can be pretty much anything from figurines to hex tiles to dice to game boards to whatever. You roll dice by grabbing, shaking, and tossing them. As in real life, some restraint is called for in not throwing them at the game board. There’s a pretty full array of built in dice, and I saw some more esoteric (d7s, d100s, etc.) ones on the workshop. Everyone has a hand of cards, which they can freely look at but other players can only see the backs of. If you’re paying attention, sure, you could tell if they played the same one they drew. Admittedly, it wouldn’t quite be as obvious as in real life, though. At the moment, if you wanted to look at a face down card you would have to flip it, which everyone could see, or you would have to temporarily put it in your hand or a fog of war area to flip it where only you can see. Hopefully they will add peeking functionality at some point.
Names and artwork can be trademarked and copyrighted respectively but a list of rules describing a system can’t. You couldn’t legally create Settlers of Catan in VASSAL but you could make Colonizers of Catlandia with all original artwork and be fine. That’s how Words with Friends got away with copying Scrabble on the iPhone.