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Tabletop Simulator[Subject Thread] [Add Response]
Wyatt Van Dyke wrote on Mon, Jun 13, 2016 11:58 PM UTC:

Thanks for the thorough response, Dr. Duniho. For the record, I already knew about Game Courier and its features, and I think it's cool too.

I understand if you don't get Tabletop Simulator's unconventional approach to simulating tabletop games. It's less of a game simulator and more of a game set simulator. In chess and its variants, for example, if you're playing with a physical set, captured pieces are set to the side, and everybody is fine with that. The same goes here. Like in most game sets, the rules are left to the players instead of the code. Because of this, modest variants and house rules aren't as difficult to implement as in most software for traditional games. The one disadvantage of Tabletop Simulator in my eyes is that only live play is possible and correspondence play is out of the question. Still, if you like the rules being enforced by the game itself and having captured pieces disappear, I won't judge you. I like that too.


🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Mon, Jun 13, 2016 10:35 PM UTC:

I bought it when it was on sale for half price, because there was someone who was developing Chess variants with it, and I wanted to see what he was doing. On the plus side, Tabletop Simulator has 3D graphics. On the minus side, it is missing everything else you would need to easily play Chess variants with it. First of all, this is a physics simulator, not a board game simulator. It treats Chess pieces as physical objects and has no knowledge of the game. It doesn't even understand that when I move one piece to another piece's space, the piece I moved should replace the piece originally on the space. It seems to have no concept of a space as a discrete area of a game board. Except for one thing, which I haven't really investigated yet, I would say it has no usefulness for playing Chess variants. This one thing is that Tabletop Simulator can be controlled with the scripting language Lua. So, if someone were to write code in Lua that made Tabletop Simulator treat pieces and spaces as game objects instead of as physical objects, it would begin to be useful for playing Chess variants. If someone could code the rules of Chess variants into it with Lua, that would be even better.

In case you're not aware, this site has Game Courier, which lets you play innumerable Chess variants with others online, and it includes many important features for playing Chess variants that are lacking in Tabletop Simulator.


Wyatt Van Dyke wrote on Mon, Jun 13, 2016 09:03 PM UTC:

Has anyone here heard of Tabletop Simulator? It's a sandbox-like game that's designed for playing tabletop games. It looks like it's closer to OTB play than most other board game video games, which is pretty neat.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/286160/

Obviously, there are lots of chess variants on this site that people would love to play. There are quite a few chess variants in Steam Workshop already, the most notable being an original variant: Portal Chess.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=261463483

If anybody wants to adapt chess variants from this site to Tabletop Simulator, they're more than welcome to. I'd love to see their efforts!


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