In March of 2020 I flew to Denver to attend a Protospiel convention. I'm a big fan of Protospiels, having already attended two in Minneapolis and one in Milwaukee. These conventions allow game designers and playtesters to get to know each other, show off their prototypes, and provide and receive valuable feedback. They are always very educational and fun. Denver was no exception, even though there was an atmosphere of uncertainty around the sudden spread of COVID-19 in the US. It's quaint to think back on those very early moments of the pandemic, before anyone was wearing masks. I remember checking the tally of positive cases in Colorado before flying out and feeling nervous that it had risen above ten! At the time I knew this event would probably be the last in-person convention I or anyone else would attend for a while. But "a while" in most people's minds then meant a month or two.
After a spring of social distancing, once it was clear the pandemic had staying power, playtesting shifted to online venues. Gradually designers and players accepted the new reality. What emerged was a system in which people would meet on a Discord server, use its voice chat function to break into small groups, and then hop onto Tabletop Simulator (or occasionally Tabletopia, although Tabletop Simulator seems to have become the favorite).
Tabletop Simulator (TTS) is an amazing resource for online gaming, but it also has a bit of a learning curve for not-so-tech-savvy folks like me to create (or even just play) a digital version of a tabletop game. To use it you must first download Steam, which is essentially a game hosting service. Steam itself is free, but any game you play on the platform must first be separately purchased and downloaded. TTS normally costs about $20, unless you buy it during one of Steam's periodic sales. As the name implies, TTS is basically a tool for recreating a physical board game in the digital realm. Users can do this themselves, by importing and customizing various ready-made assets such as dice, cards, boards, and other pieces. Or they can simply access many of the games already created by other users (often for free, though you may have to pay to access games created professionally by game publishers). Either way, playing a game on TTS requires some getting used to the interface, with different keyboard commands to learn for rolling dice, flipping cards, manipulating pieces, etc.
Once I got used to playing games on TTS it was then time to create a digital version of my own game. It was slow going at first. For one thing, the program seems to cater to PC users, whereas I have a Mac. It does work with both systems, but anecdotally it is less intuitive on a Mac. Not only do I use a Mac, but it's a rather elderly one, and TTS is a taxing program to run. To confirm what you've by now suspected I am not the most computer literate person ever. That said, I'm probably not alone in at least some of the difficulties I encountered in the process of building my game on TTS. One issue I had early on was not getting the game to display the image I uploaded for the main game board. Smaller images like the player mats and other tiles worked fine, but the program found something about the larger file for the board unacceptable. This problem was intractable. I eventually gave up after a week or so of trying every suggestion I came across on the help forums, only to resume my efforts a month later with more success. I still don't know what I did wrong on those earlier attempts.
Fast forward to the Fall of 2020 and I finally have a playable version of Three Days on Callisto on TTS, just in time for the October "Protospiel Online" event. Given the limitations of not being face to face the event went very well, both for the convention overall and for me personally. Lots of designers got their games to the virtual table, Three Days on Callisto got positive reactions, and I gained valuable feedback.
There were a few glitches with my game however. For instance some players reported seeing white pieces when they were supposed to be colored (and looked colored on my screen). Luckily they were able to switch the colors on their screens in real time and managed that way. When the event was over I tinkered more, trying to fix these little bugs, as well as take advantage of other features to make the game more user-friendly. But when I debuted this newer version at an informal playtesting session there were even more problems. The color issue seemed to have gotten worse somehow. Also many of the moving pieces were "locked" by default, causing players to painstakingly unlock each one before the start of the game. On top of that I had added "snap" points to various spots on the board in an effort to make the board look neater, and streamline the placement of small bits. This wound up being a bad choice, as players kept having pieces snap to the wrong locations. By the time we actually got through all the debugging and my now-flustered rendition of the rules, forty-five minutes had gone by.
I'm now getting ready for another Protospiel Online. To help eliminate as many of these problems as possible in advance I actually purchased a second copy of TTS for our laptop. So as I make fixes and updates to the game on my creaky Mac, I periodically invite this second account to the table and then glance at the laptop to verify that everything looks good. So far it appears version 3.0 is bug free. But somehow I know I haven't accounted for everything.
Once the pandemic is behind us I predict we will retain some of its playtesting protocols. For all its faults online gaming has some undeniable strengths. People from all over the world who otherwise may have never met each other can get together fairly easily (albeit virtually) to game. No air fare or road trips. No need for hotels or even fighting traffic across town. These advantages are convenient enough that they're probably here to stay. That said, online gaming will never really beat the experience of sitting across a real table from live people to play a physical board game. As far as I'm concerned that day can't come too soon.
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