I popped over to Kickstarter today to see if anything looked interesting in the world of new games. Kickstarter has gotten pretty big in game development, especially for tabletop games, so this is something I do from time to time.

Anyway, I landed on Plunderous, and holy heck it has a lot of goodies! I didn’t bother counting, but I swear there are hundreds of pieces, including custom dice and steampunk miniatures. Big, brightly colored island hex tiles caught my eye, but the Mechalodon, Leviatron, and Mechalopod miniatures alone are worth the price of admission, which, as I scrolled through the page, turned out to be free on a site called Tabletopia.

“What?” I said. “Don’t tell me there’s a site for playing tabletop games online…”

I clicked, of course, and wow! Right there in front of me was a site boasting nearly 1300 tabletop games, ready to play. Excited, I started exploring, which is where I ran into the first headache. Clicking on “All Games” at the top, you can click through 65 pages of games listed in no particular order. Aside from the no particular order part, the only real problem is that if you click “more info” on any of the games and then hit your back button, you go all the way back to page 1 of 65. That’s a lot of clicking to get back to where you were.

Still, I was pretty excited. A bunch of the games offer solo play options, so I signed up for a free bronze account. There are two paid monthly subscription options as well, but I just wanted a nosey. I was going to try a solo run at Roll Player. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of first attempting to update my profile. I tried several times, and each time when I selected United States as my country, the site froze and stopped responding. I was able to eventually update my profile, but only by not selecting a country, but hey, I’m in and ready to try a game. Will talk about that next time, but for right now, I’m more curious what other platforms are out there.

I’d never heard of Tabletopia before. I’d heard of a few RPG platforms like PlayRole.com, Roll20, and a few others, but clearly there are a lot more out there. Any exciting startups in the space? Who should I be keeping my eye on?

With the US plodding along the road to endless self-quarantine, there’s an opportunity for sure. In any case, right now I have a game to play, and a bunch of platforms to try.

Take care, and happy gaming!