Tabletop Simulator is half-price on Steam right now

With board game nights going online, one tool you might find helpful to keep rolling bones, flipping dominoes, tapping tokens, dealing cards, and fighting over who gets to be the Scottie dog is Tabletop Simulator. And lo, the toolkit to virtually simulate all sorts of tabletop games with pals or by yourself is half-price on Steam right now. You can play a load of preset old favourites, design your own games, try to copy a favourite game using the creation tools, or just freely download games other people have made/copied.

Tabletop Simulator comes with the fairly standard contents of a nan's game cupboard already set up: Chess, Solitaire, Go, Backgammon, Dominoes, jigsaw puzzles, and such. The big draw is that people can create all sorts of other games in it, all sorts of combinations of boards, token, dice, figurines, scenery pieces, and assets you create. For most people, yeah, that mostly means you can download games other people have already made. It uses the Steam Workshop so it's pretty easy to browse and nab games. Modder Superior's look from December should get you started with everything from the Portal board game to a surprisingly good ten-pin bowling game.

A number of cardboard games have official Tabletop Simulator releases as paid DLC too, including Scythe, Cosmic Encounter, Superfight, Warfighter, and Zombicide. Some cardboard creators put their own games into Tabletop Simulator for free as well, such as with the Frosthaven demo module created to help promote the Gloomhaven spin-off's ongoing Kickstarter campaign.

What I'm saying is: Tabletop Simulator is a whole lot of tabletop games in one. It's not the best option for roleplaying games but it's pretty deece for a whole lot of the rest. I've seen a fair few pals turn to TTS over the past few weeks, though Board Game Arena seems popular too. But I'm no tableface myself - what say you, reader dear?

A single copy of Tabletop Simulator will run you £7.49/€9.99/$9.99 on Steam in the sale, while a pack of four comes for £22.49/€27.49/$29.99 - that's one copy free. This sale will run until 6pm on Tuesday (that's 10am Pacific).

Our Alice Bee flagged Tabletop Simulator as one of the good games to play while social distancing (or would that be a good game to play good games to play while social distancing?) and it certainly seems popular. Tabletop Simulator has smashed player records over the past month or so, going from a usual monthly peak of around 4000-5000 concurrent players to a mighty 36,793 in the past 30 days.