Want a Tabletop Simulator like experience but prefer free and open source games? Keep an eye on Tabletop Club. One I've been meaning to give a shout-out to for a little while, as I dig through a bunch of my missed items from before the holiday season.
Available under the MIT license on GitHub and itch.io, it enables you to play various tabletop games offline or online without the need for registrations and logins as you can just host a game and share a room code with friends.
In Tabletop Club, you are given a box of toys to play with, and it's up to you what you do with them! Sure, you can play board games, but why not make a house made of dice, then frisbee it with a poker chip? Draw on the table while waiting for your opponent to make a move in chess, or flip the table into deep space after losing an all-in bet? The table is your oyster!
Developed using a modified Godot Engine, it allows you to do pretty much anything, since you can import your own stuff into it too.
Early days for the game project, with a first Beta version only going up in November last year. Nice to see more open source games appear though, especially stuff like this that can have such wide uses.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tabletop Simulator is a good resource, because it can be used for lots and lots of different games and is fairly easy for people to make mods (no programming necessary), even if it is not the most convenient (for games that have proper digital adaptations). But being a closed, proprietary platform is less than ideal as your mod/adaptation/prototype becomes locked into it, and everyone needs to have bought it to join the game (it is decently cheap, but when you want to play a game "on the fly" it is another hurdle to make sure everyone has it or is willing to buy it on a whim).
Also, the devs of TTS can be problematic, like when they added a bunch of awful machine translations as if they had localized the game to all the languages, and it created a lot of issues for players where the game defaulted to those. So it's good to have more alternatives beyond TTS/tabletopia (and other, non-physics based implementations of course).
Hopefully TTC price tag of free will attract content creators since that's really the core to what makes these kind of games long term viable.
StoneColdSpider Jan 17, 2023
Quoting: eldakingThat's a really nice project, I'll definitely look more into it.TTS is certainly expensive enough to keep people from joining. I have some friends with TTS and for some games, we definitely prefer it to anything else. Yet we play online boardgames with lots of different people and we only ever got one person to buy TTS once.
Tabletop Simulator is a good resource, because it can be used for lots and lots of different games and is fairly easy for people to make mods (no programming necessary), even if it is not the most convenient (for games that have proper digital adaptations). But being a closed, proprietary platform is less than ideal as your mod/adaptation/prototype becomes locked into it, and everyone needs to have bought it to join the game (it is decently cheap, but when you want to play a game "on the fly" it is another hurdle to make sure everyone has it or is willing to buy it on a whim).
Also, the devs of TTS can be problematic, like when they added a bunch of awful machine translations as if they had localized the game to all the languages, and it created a lot of issues for players where the game defaulted to those. So it's good to have more alternatives beyond TTS/tabletopia (and other, non-physics based implementations of course).
I'm currently thinking about *joining* this project and getting into tooling. I think having lots of "smart" helper objects that can help you do tedious tasks is the key to a really good board-game sandbox.
Last edited by const on 17 January 2023 at 9:23 am UTC
Last edited by ridge on 18 January 2023 at 5:55 pm UTC
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