A table that isn't there

Old Man got me to download a new game this week called Tabletop Simulator.  It isn't a game in itself though, more like a platform for games to happy upon.  It is a physics simulator that allows you to manipulate pieces around on it just as if it were a physical board.  If you want to play a particular game you need a mod that simulates that game... so I got the Gloomhaven mod and we played together.

It was super weird.

My brain kept expecting TS to actually play the game for me.  I struggled with the interface a lot because I was continually looking for it to actually make Gloomhaven happen and it was only once I really got into the idea that this is just a box with parts in it that everything came together.  I think I have trained myself that when you play a board game on a computer everything just happens automatically and you click your actions so it required a bit of rewiring to get used to how TS operates.

I literally had to click on the box of board pieces, lift the correct one out, then put it on the board.  Figuring out which piece I needed required flipping through the manual that is sitting on the board.  Learning how all the interface options work together took a bit of doing, and when I finally had it all worked out the funniest thing happened.

I thought "Hah, this game is silly.  I could just cheat and win!"

Which is true of, you know, every board game in history.  But my brain just kept on going back to thinking of it as a computer game and apparently that has totally different wiring.

I don't know how much other use I will get out of TS.  I don't actually want to click a piece, move it to the right spot, and drop it down.  I don't want to have to manually change the hit points on a target.  I *love* it that computer games handle all the shuffling and setup and other annoyances.

But I really do love Gloomhaven and being able to play with people at a distance, and being able to kibitz with Old Man while I was doing it, was fantastic.  I think this means that I will use TS to play Gloomhaven and probably not much else.  It does the thing it is trying to do quite well but I don't know that I actually want a physics engine to play board games - I would rather do it in person whenever possible.  Gloomhaven is expensive to buy, limited in uses, and hard to find players for.  It also isn't available as a automated game so far as I know.  So TS is the best place to play it.

I gotta give credit though.  TS has a button you can hit that flips the table and all the bits go flying everywhere.  That is almost as satisfying as doing it in real life and you don't actually have to clean up afterwards.