5 Reasons To Use Tabletopia For Rapid Prototyping

Drawing, cutting, sleeving… it’s all nirvana for me. I can honestly say that making board games might be the most fun I’ve had as an adult.

Gary and I were brainstorming Chocolatier(think Viticulture for truffles) but the ideas came faster than the designs were playable. The problem with analog designing is the time and resources needed for each iteration of the game. There are so many benefits to using Tabletopia for your game that I thought I would share my top 5 reasons the platform has impacted my design process. So let’s jump right in!

 

This is just a small sample of the many tokens, bits and dice that are available for use that are already included in the design environment. There are even user created objects in an ever growing library that are available. Just add them to your game so that when creating your layout, you can drag and drop them onto your table. I tend to throw it all on the table for my first few iterations so that I can swap out or add objects as our A.D.D brainstorming sessions require.

Chances are good that what you need is already available in the standard or shared library. When it’s not and you really want to see what your game is like with those custom meeples or tokens, you can quickly create them in Tabletopia. I was able to make custom chef meeples with two simple png images. Simply create an image with transparency so that the only solid colored areas are the object you want to create and use that when making custom tokens. Set the width, border color and oreintation – verticle in this case. As an artist at heart, it’s important for me to get a feel for the custom components early on. With Tabletopia, this is an easy process and increases the aesthetics when play testing.

This is a very small sample of my collection of prototyping bits. Altogether, there is about $1100 worth of bits but it still pales in comparison to the standard library of objects on Tabletopia. Add to that all the custom bits you care to make and the value of your Tabletopia subscription seems very low. There are a few standard colors that aren’t in a few of the object libraries but the custom objects are an easy fix.

The only feature we are waiting on for Dragon Brew are the hidden zones.  It’s listed as a ‘coming soon’ feature but when pressed, the dev team admitted that it might be a while before it’s available. For now, players use the honor system. I have yet to play with someone who didn’t go out of their way to avoid seeing my tableau.

Sure, nothing quite replaces being face to face with a bunch of dice and meeples between you and victory, but Tabletopia is as close to that experience as you can get right now. We usually Skype while playing and have a lot of verbal interaction going on.

If you are anything like me, carving out design time is tough. Coordinating times to play test is even harder. With tabletopia, you can send invite codes to anyone with an internet connection and be playing in a few minutes. This also allows you to tap into demographics and tastes of players you may not have geographically close enough to play with in real life. It’s far more likely to find someone online at noon on Wednesday than would play than meeting someone locally. This way, you can fill random time slots with productive play testing. Something I had never considered before Tabletopia is the ability to play test with deeply vested fans. Dragon Brew has a dedicated play test group that plays online from different locations around the world.