Saturday!

Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to make the idea of sitting down at a table with manipulable virtual play pieces into a reality.

They usually had to make do with making actual play pieces for the actual game that they were playing. Unfortunately, the majority of the boards were only good for one or two different kinds of games and the same went for the pieces. Cards were somewhat better, insofar as it was possible to play many different games with a single (or double) deck, but lose a single piece/card and suddenly you find yourself with useless clutter.

So something where you put on a pair of glasses and, suddenly, the empty card table in front of you has a map on it with all sorts of little figurines is something that I’ve been dreaming of for approximately forever.

In the last couple of years, we’ve gotten closer, though.

Applications like Tabletop Simulator provide a decent enough physics sandbox that will allow for people to play with a handful of tokens (and the DLC available allows for tokens identical to those found in popular board games) and that’s probably about as good as it’s gonna get for the near future.

I mean, until we all get to wear oculus rifts with cameras on the front providing heads up displays and Magic Leap kinda experiences.

So… what are you playing?

(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]