It takes some getting used to, but Tabletop Simulator is just about the most powerful, versatile, multiplayer client for playing tabletop games – and you can currently nab it on the Humble store for under ten bucks, a 50% discount on the regular price of $19.99 (£24.99)
An esteemed – if famously finicky – cornerstone of the tabletop gaming hobby since it released in 2015, Tabletop Simulator (TTS) is essentially a bewilderingly flexible physics engine, with a gigantic library of add-ons to allow you to play every tabletop game imaginable, from Scrabble to Warhammer 40k.
Don’t let the key art’s poker chips and chess pieces fool you into thinking TTS is just a compendium of classic board games so you can play endless digital games of backgammon or Crazy Eights with your Aunt Edie six states over. Oh no.
Some of the best board games of the modern age are fully playable on TTS: among the 40 official DLC packs available are complete modules to play crackers like Zombicide, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, Blood Rage, and Boss Monster, all priced between around $5 (£3) and $15 (£11).
And that’s just the appetizer, because the real joy of TTS is the unnervingly huge wealth of completely free, user-created mods in the Steam Workshop, which provide fully working digital recreations of thousands of tabletop games of every stripe.
Among the top-rated mods are TTS versions of the landmark RPG adventure Gloomhaven, spectacular strategy board games like Root and Twilight Imperium, and legendary dungeon crawler HeroQuest, to name but a few. There are even free mods to play beloved games that have gone – or will soon go – out of production, like Star Wars X-Wing and Armada, on which publisher Atomic Mass Games recently announced it was ending production.
If you’re a tabletop gamer who also plays on PC, and you don’t yet have TTS, we can genuinely recommend it as a skeleton key that opens up a lot of fun opportunities.
Don’t get us wrong, TTS is essentially just a big physics playroom with clever, but imperfect tools – and it accordingly feels very slow and clumsy to use at first, especially working with fan-built mods that are rough around the edges. But once you get the hang of things it’s easy enough, and the massive access to games makes the effort worthwhile.
Plus, buying it from Humble store, you get the choice to contribute part of your purchase to one of loads of different charities – another reason to drop a measly ten bucks on this if you haven’t already!
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Source: Wargamer
