About the game: Tabletop Simulator is exactly what it sounds like: an online simulation/recreation of a tabletop, for which you to play any sort of tabletop games you can think of, from board games to card games to drawing lewd pictures on your friends side of the table. It is a game designed to be played with friends late at night, laughing together in voice chat or in person. It even has VR support, which is a bonus if you are part of the 1% who owns a headset. Any game you can think of is on the steam workshop for you to download and play with friends.
The most important aspects:
The number of games available to play: there are seemingly infinite games you can play. The steam workshop hosts thousands of the most popular games, from Munchkins, to clue, to twilight imperium, or even virtual legos. This game had more tabletop games available than I would have thought possible, and it is not often that games exceed my expectations to such a high degree. This means that there is no limit to replay-ability, because you can play a different game every time and never run out. It is a game within a game each time. In the aspects of number of games available and replay-ability, it excels.
Graphics, ui, and controlls:
For a tabletop simulator, this is one of the most important parts to get right. Seeing as the game itself is a platform rather than a game, the platform needs to have the diverse controls to allow almost any game to be played while also remaining simplistic enough and easy to understand. Somehow it pulls it off. While the graphics or the ui can look a bit dated or janky, with the best equivalent comparison being the look and feel of the garry's mod ui, It functions and works, even if it is not explained fully at first. In this respect it is about exactly as expected.
Multiplayer: works great 99% of the time, however sometimes you get an error with steam where you have to relaunch the game in order to play with friends. This is not a game you should attempt to play with random people. For this reason, I suggest buying the 4-pack (or multiple 4-packs) on sale when you can.
Overall Impressions:
It is a game made for casual fooling around and getting everyone to laugh, however if you have never played/hosted before, you should read up on the different "moderation" like tools so that you can keep players from flipping the table over and ruining it every 10 seconds. It set out to be a platform to be able to play any tabletop game imaginable online, and it achieved that goal spectacularly. If you buy it, play it with friends and have fun!
Definitely worth the price, seeing as one of the 1000's of games available to play costs more than tabletop simulator does.
Tabletop simulator is worth the buy, even not on sale, however it goes on sale 50% off regularly, so keep that in mind.
