Wingspan tabletop simulator simulator#

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. 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'. 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.Ī 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. 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. 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. 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. Playtable requires no account, merely requires you to give a link to your friends to join. To that I say, stop building token locking systems into engines, stop building complex joining systems! Turns out people just want to play games. Developers often get confused and think these systems require massive user and permissioning systems, and lots of interaction structure, which is a wrong assumption. 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. Currently, the best product out there is Tabletopia in terms of usability, I recommend you give it a try.

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. TTS is one of the worst systems for usability. Howdy, I'm the developer of Playtable, and I'm really intersted in tackling the usability aspect you are talking about.

Wingspan tabletop simulator simulator#

Is there a Boardgame Simulator out there that I'm missing? :) Then they need to document how the game UI works which seems to be hit-or-miss depending on who wrote the mod.įor Heroquest, at least, it then seemed like I needed to spend a bunch of effort to get past the 3D aspects of the game in order to focus on the actual gameplay (which is fundamentally 2D).Īt the end of the day it feels like trying to smash a 3D peg into a 2D round hole - I love the idea but in practice having a dedicated, 2D board game framework seems like it might be a better fit for board games. I think each game maker can make their own choices about how the UI should work so it's not clear what I should be looking for (in terms of UI widgets).

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 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.