Sunday, March 11, 2018

Tabletopia

In reviewing Game Board Geek, online resources, podcasts, and even a peer of my wife's who happens to be into board games, I came across a repetitive game reference that finally peaked my interest...
Tabletopia
It's a pretty cool online board game site (accessed through Steam for me).  Not only can you play over 500 board games absolutely FREE, but if you can figure out the fairly straight forward game building mechanics you can build your board game digitally!
To do so you need images and text to communicate what is happening in the game, but luckily for me everything I have been doing thus far is on SVG/PNG file saving, and the site allows for full PNG integration.
This means every card I have designed so far I can visualize in the game creator, and practice playtesting it online instead of just physically.
This will go a long way in testing alone (as shuffling/dealing/etc is pretty lame when you are alone).  It is also much faster to go back to the original SVG file, make some edits, save as PNG, then repost into the game with the adjustments and see how they work.
When it comes to card games, and attack/GP/XP values, it is difficult to determine what is fair, what is lame, and what is way too powerful.  Playtesting solves that, for the most part.  I don't think I could find a better way to start playtesting the game than this.
I discovered its potential yesterday, then today I put in about 3 hours fiddling around with it, then uploading cards into it.
I think I can probably get an ALPHA version of the game ready to play online (private mode only) by the end of day Wednesday.  Then I can see how this plays out visually in a 4 player setting as well...

Hope it pans out as well as I am making it out to be.... guess we will know in a few days!

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