Tabletop Playground News

This post is all about colors and how they work in Tabletop Playground. Colors are used in two ways: to identify players and to customize objects.


Each player in a game is identified by a color. There are 10 different color options (those are, by the way, based on a color palette that is distinguishable for players with color blindness – click here for some scientific background on the topic). You can switch your player color in game. When you save the game and continue later with the same players, everyone will start with their previously chosen color.

The player color also determines which objects you “own”: currently, only card holders can have owners. Only the owning player (defined by player color) can see which cards are on a card holder. But you also have the choice to set it to ownerless so everyone can see the cards.




You can modify colors for most objects in the game. The simplest case is a uniformly colored object: you will set the color of the whole object. You can either freely choose a color, or you can quickly set it to your player color or a configurable custom color.



You can also set a color for simple textured objects: it will “tint” the whole object with that color.



But often you don’t want to change the color of entire objects. Take a chess board, for example: the squares are usually black and white. However, for some chess sets light brown and dark brown may work better, or some other color combination (green and pink, anyone?). The chess board in Tabletop Playground is set up so you can edit both square colors independently. Other objects, like dice, work in a similar way.



If you want to create your own objects, you can also define where colors can be changed: In the editor you can include an “extra map” texture, where red color defines where you want the primary color, and green parts are used for the secondary color. The blue and alpha channels of the extra map are used to define roughness and metallic appearance, which will be the subject of the next post!

Hi, in this post I'd like to talk about the different objects that you can interact with in Tabletop Playground. Currently, there are seven different object types implemented: standard objects (e.g. cube, ball, pawn,…), dice, cards, card holders, containers, cardboard figures, and tables.

You will probably not use all of these object types in every game you choose to play: some are more useful for board games or card games, others may come in handy for wargaming. So, let's have a closer look!





Many games include elements that are simple standard objects (in Tabletop Playground those are also called “Generic” objects). They don't have any special behaviour – just imagine a pawn, or chess piece. In a game you would mostly interact with these objects by moving them over your game board. By the way: game boards are also standard objects!

Standard objects are mostly characterized by their physical properties. But you are able to influence those! Change the appearance (colors, roughness, or make them metallic) of an object, or play around with the scale. You can also define the bounciness and friction. Just try it out – it's a lot of fun to watch your objects slide on the table without friction.





Dice are an important part of many board games. Tabletop Playground includes six standard dice shapes. When you throw dice, they will spin randomly and all players get notified with what you threw once they settle. Using the Editor, you can create dice in any shape!





Cards are the only component of pure card games, but they are used in many other tabletop games as well. Tabletop Playground includes standard playing cards. But you can also create your own cards – in a rectangular, round or even hexagonal shape. Cards can be flipped and stacked, and card stacks can be shuffled.





In many games, you will want to organize a hand of cards, or keep your cards hidden from other players. Card holders help you do that: you can drop cards on a holder and order them as you would in your hand. Each card holder can have an owner. This means that cards on the player's holder are not visible to other players.





In some games, you need an infinite supply of certain objects (like go stones), or you want to grab a random piece out of a selection of objects (think of the letters in Scrabble). For these situations, the container object type is what you need! You insert items by simply dropping them onto the container. And you can drag them out either randomly or in a defined order, such as first in-first out.





Cardboard figures don't have any special behavior: they are just a convenient way to get figures into the game from a 2D Image. You create the figures in the editor of Tabletop Playground. You can select a round or rectangular base, or use your own base model. Then, all you need is an image and you have a 3D game piece!





Surprise: the action in Tabletop Playground takes place on a table. The game comes with a selection of eight different tables, but you can also create your own tables for custom games. You can get creative with what a “table” can be: for example, you could create a miniature golf lane course! However, the main property of tables is that they are unmovable and serve as a surface for your game.

That's it for the quick overview of all currently implemented object types. You can create your own versions of all of them using the editor, which I will talk about in one of the next posts. If you want more details, head over to the knowledge base that just went online with the first articles about object types. I still have ideas for several additional possible object types, which will get introduced as Tabletop Playground continues to evolve.