I’ve mentioned it before how we’ve been playing some games on there due to Covid-19. It is a digital gaming system that you can purchase through Steam that then has modules on it for playing games, but the question is, how good is it for gaming? Is it worth dropping the money, especially with places slowly opening up again?

Tabletop Simulator (TTS) is a digital gaming system. It is basically an “engine” that can drive any type of board game from simple card games to something as complex as Gloomhaven. To play a game, you have to first get and install the module, but only the person who is hosting the “server” will have to install the module, the other people playing will be able to connect. Then, if the game is scripted it’ll help set-up the game and get you ready to go, if it isn’t, you have to set-up the game. After that you can hop in and start playing the game.

Now, that sounds pretty cool, but I want to talk about scripted versus not scripted because that is an important topic. Scripted games are pretty enjoyable on TTS. It gets you up and running fast, and while there can be some hiccups with how they work, for the most part it isn’t bad. I’ve played Clank, for the first time ever, on TTS and it was easy to pick-up and work with, even with some hiccups in the scripting. I’ve played multiple games of Dice Throne through their official module on TTS and that worked extremely smoothly. On the other hand, we were playing the Forgotten Circles expansion on TTS for Gloomhaven and that was not scripted and set-up was over an hour, some of it was learning the system but some of it is that without scripting there is a ton more work for the set-up. And scripting is often beyond set-up, Dice Throne has a button for the upkeep phase when you start your turn so you don’t have to remember to draw a card and get a CP (combat point).

Game play, I’d say, is generally a little bit slower. Some of that is just the technology. The commands are a bit slower to do as compared to playing in real life as well. Scripted again is faster, but a scenario of Gloomhaven took us, without set-up, around 2.5 hours to get through the whole thing in two nights versus about 1.5 hours if we’d played it in person, or possibly even less than that. Playing Dice Throne, however, was only marginally slower than it would be in real life. I’d say that it would be pretty similar for Clank as well. But it is slower and if something gets messed up, it can take a little while, even with the rewind functionality to fix it. And some of this depends on network speed as well. The processing for everything is kind of jointly handled, so if someone has a slow connection, it can really make the whole thing lag.

There’s another issue with TTS that I want to address. Some of the modules that you can install are fan made and not official. Things like the Gloomhaven one have become officially licensed, but it wasn’t originally. Dice Throne one is official as well. Now, even the unofficial ones can be great to use and will give you an idea about the game, but understand that the company hasn’t signed off on it and technically it is illegal for that to be there, a direct copy of the game. But when companies do use it for a game it’s great. I was able to teach Dice Throne to someone who has been interested in it for a while, but hasn’t had a chance to play my copy. Even for the official ones, I would strongly recommend, if you enjoy the game on TTS to pick it up or at least someone in the group to, so you can continue to support the actual businesses and game designers directly.

With that said, there is something great about it as well. It gives you a chance to test out a game to see if you’d like it before you buy it. And there are some companies that will put out a module with a first scenario or a bit of the game when they launch a Kickstarter or release the game so that people can test it out. So in that way, it can help drive sales to release a limited version, shorter, smaller, however it might be limited, for people to try out and really get an idea of game play. I might be hard pressed to put $100 into a campaign game (I’m really not), but if I could try out an intro scenario that is just made for teaching the game on TTS, that would be great and give me a better idea if I’d like it or not.

So, as a system is it worth getting? I would say, kind of. I think it works well when you want to play a board game as a distance. There are some good modules and a good number of scripted ones. But, it does lack the same feeling as playing across a table from another person. And for me, the little bit of added time, or a lot of added time in the case of Gloomhaven without it being scripted was disappointing. The best way I can describe it is that because the system was made to handle any game, it can’t handle any game extremely efficiently. It works in a pinch, and if you don’t think you’ll get out gaming for a while and you want to game, it’s worth it.

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