03 Feb 2016

Our progress in January

An overview of new features for players and game designers

Dear Friends and Tabletopia users!

In Russia, from the 1st to 11th January is the year’s longest holiday :). But we decided to skip that and work work work instead… So here is a summary of what we have done in the last month.

1. Game flow improvements

We’ve implemented a set of tools to make each game session easier to manage. This set of tools consists of two major parts:

player roles (host, player, spectator)
game session phases

Player roles. Now each game has a Host - a person who is in control of everything and can delegate some of his permissions to his fellow players and spectators. These permissions include new invitations to the game, seat management and game flow control.

At the beginning of each game, you can now “shuffle” the players or seats. This will allow you to randomly distribute player colors and the seating order of the players.

All games now consists of three phases - pre-game, in-game and paused. Only during the in-game phase, players will be able to manipulate objects on the table. So, you can now go to make yourself a cup of coffee or even travel for one week to New Zealand, and when you return, you can be sure that nobody changed anything on the table or got access to some sensitive in-game information.

You can read more about all these features here.

This is one of the most important steps for us in preparation for the future implementation of the player matching module, because when you will play with “strangers” - game control is very important.

2. Unity 5 and browser support

We have finished the migration to Unity 5 and now have access to many new features and are going to use them for a variety of improvements. The most important thing is one of the first steps for a WebGL version of our game client (Unity’s alternative to run games over Web). WebGL will allow to you to run Tabletopia’s games in Chrome, Edge and Opera.

3. Steam launch

This continues to be our first priority. We plan to have everything ready for Steam Early Access within one month and are currently testing it in February.

4. New games

We are proud to say that we now have 189 games in our catalog and more are being added each week. Among them are Lewis & Clark, K2, Stronghold (2nd edition), Steampunk Rally, 1944: Race to the Rhine.

Our users can monitor our game catalog or try out games from our weekly digest “Games from this weekend”. And you can find out about our upcoming games on our Facebook page or BGG official list. From time to time, we publish open game demos for very cool games like this Vinhos Deluxe (try out the demo here).

Buy vineyards; build wineries; develop your estates, and produce and sell fine wines. Two games in one box by all-star Portuguese designer Vital Lacerda Boardgames! Check the Kickstarter campaign here http://kck.st/20bwr05 !