2020: The Year I Learned to Love Stealing Board Games
By far, my GOTY for 2020 is Tabletop Simulator. There’s no game I put nearly as many hours into this year, 375, to be precise, and certainly no game that has provided me with as much connection in a disconnected year. When I first encountered Tabletop Simulator a few years ago, I thought it was a joke, just one of many “simulators” that clutter Steam’s marketplace. Goat Simulator, Surgeon Simulator, amongst others deploy wacky Havoc physics and satirize their subject matter. Tabletop Simulator is always fully physics’d up and has a dedicated “flip table” button which sends all the pieces flying, and it always seemed to be one of that genre. Besides, who would ever want to play boardgames online in a clunky physics environment, when you can play perfectly serviceable games with no mess on sites like Board Game Arena, Tabletopia, and Yucata? Ha Ha Ha
Reader, I was wrong!!!
The missing link for me with Tabletop Simulator is the modding scene. Almost every board game I’ve ever had a desire to play ends up in the Steam Workshop for TTS. There’s more available there than there is on any of the board game websites I’ve mentioned before. And while some of them are officially licensed, foolishly, many of them are illicit rips. Board gaming is often an exclusionary hobby, the main reason for which being that board games are expensive. The second of which being, you need to have friends who live near you. With TTS, most of the best games ever printed are free, and your friends can live anywhere with a good internet connection!
I’ve been playing games with a group of friends online for years, but it took COVID to really push us to consider using TTS. That was in March. Now, we’ve had a weekly Gloomhaven game running for 10 months, and we never have to set it up (which is a notoriously onerous aspect of Gloomhaven), we just have to load the state of our game. I’ve had a friend come over (in my bubble) and bring his laptop just so we could play the Arkham Horror card game mod together. To collect all the components of Arkham Horror, which is a collectible card game, is extremely expensive. With TTS, it’s illegal and free.
Bless Tabletop Simulator, and bless the nerds producing content for it, you’ve made a horrible year slightly less bad.