It can be nice I guess when you've internalized the camera to the point you don't have to think about it. But it's so overkill. All I really want is a fast lightweight client that runs on anything.

Is there a 2D tabletop simulator? Friends and I have used it a ton as a fallback for games which don't have a digital copy; you can just scan your physical copy and have it running in TTS in an afternoon. I'm not sure there's a good alternative?

(also for true tabletop games like 40k or sigmar the 3d geometry is actually important and fun)

The big advantage of TTS is that you can manipulate any components however you want, as in physical play. You can apply house rules, add custom components (cards/factions/etc), allow take-backs or corrections, play out experimental what-if scenarios, and so on.

If you don't care about that amount of freeform object manipulation and just want to bang through a game by its standard implementation, then yeah boardgamearena will do fine.

Tabletop Simulator doesn't require coding (although it has support for it). Especially last year during the worst of the pandemic, most game designers who put in the effort were still able to host online playtest nights, attend online game designer conventions (with the help of Discord) and show their games to publishers by making a TTS version of their game.

I've looked into making my games on BGA, and their system looked like a PHP mess I didn't want to deal with. If I'm going to be coding anyway I'd rather use a Typescript game engine like Phaser, Swift and SpriteKit, or C# and Monogame, and have full control over it.

Here's one of mine I uploaded to the Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=22173...

I was excited for it but it sets both of my computers on fire and glitches out a ton.

Figma is pretty slow on my 2019 MacBook Pro.