Nowadays all the board game conventions that we used to love to attend live had to go digital. For some it may be frustrating, but for the first time, we all got a chance to attend the Cons during the year without any expensive costs involved. And here at Tabletopia, we are proud to be a part of this experience.

How to Use Tabletopia for Online Conventions?

This year we’ve put a lot of effort into making Tabletopia the place for online conventions. We were lucky to be partnering with events such as Castle Tricon, Online Portal Con, Renegade Con, and with all major events like Virtual Gaming Con, UKGE, Gen Con, AwSHUX, and SPIEL.digital.

We learned a lot and want to share some information about how you can use Tabletopia if you are organizing a board game convention.

As we encourage people to stay connected and play games, we can offer the following to large international and small local boardgaming events:

1. Tabletopia provides an opportunity for publishers to showcase their new hits even before release. This access can be exclusive during the event or it can start with the event and then keep going.
2. We understand that for online conventions it is more difficult to attract sponsors. To make digital more attractive for both publishers and game designers, we help with game implementations and can create a special promo offer for publishers that can be included in your event sponsorship package.
3. In addition to this, we promote event partnerships and games that are a part of the event. We post it to our website’s front page news feed, social media, and add special banners on the main page.
4. For small local events we can provide free Gold accounts for game masters so that they can host games, explain rules and play with visitors. This means visitors won’t need a paid Tabletopia account to play during the event.
5. For huge events, we offer promo codes with a 3-7 days Gold subscription so that any visitor can create a free Tabletopia account, apply the code, and play all games during the event for free.
6. We encourage YouTubers and streamers to host sessions on Tabletopia during events and can create a full streaming schedule with influencers and publishers.
7. We are always open to new experiments and ideas. Just send us a message to info@tabletopia.com and we’ll consider any partnership ideas.

Tabletopia + Twitch + Discord

We are now working on our own built-in video chat as we understand how important it is to communicate while playing board games. But for now, we recommend using Discord while playing on Tabletopia to get an experience similar to a regular gaming session.

So we suggest creating a connection between the Tabletopia table with a moderator and video or voice chat (Discord, or zoom, or Hangouts).

A typical setup at a physical convention would be:

1. There is a booth where a game designer is talking about the game and is explaining the rules again and again.
2. There are 2-3 tables with moderators, any guest can take a seat, get a learning session, and play with this moderator
3. There are more tables with the game, where you can sit and play by yourself

How could we replicate this digitally? Let’s say we are exhibiting the game “Orconomics”:

1. A booth for the publisher (Igrology) with a game designer can be a live stream on Twitch, Facebook, or all platforms using restream (learn how to livestream with Tabletopia).
2. Gaming tables with moderators. These are tables created by moderators. The best way is to create a schedule with clear instructions. For a game scheduled at 12pm, players would pre-register to claim available seats join the Discord channel “Orconomics table 1”, get a link to the game at 12pm, and the host will guide them.
3. Ordinary playing tables. It is just a link to the game if it is public on Tabletopia or a link to the Play Zone if it is private. A user clicking the link creates a new gaming table and can invite friends or people from Discord (you need a dedicated channel for this purpose) to play with them. If users have issues with rules they should be able to go to the main channel and ask questions. People from the publisher side will answer.

Embed Tabletopia into the Convention’s Ecosystem

If you are creating an even more complicated system with a more immersive experience – as SPIEL.digital and Castle Tricon did – you will need even more integration with Tabletopia.

1. We offer Tabletopia widgets that can be embedded on external websites. These widgets can be tuned to show the exact game, selected games, all games by one publisher, all games by a number of publishers, all games hosted by one or a group of users. These games will be shown in three tabs: play now (currently are looking for players), in progress (already playing), and Play Later (scheduled games).

So if you have a dedicated page for each game or each publisher, you can embed this widget and give attendees easy access to the gaming schedule.

2. On-demand we can create an API integration to tie Tabletopia to your platform even more. Please send us requests to info@tabletopia.com

You can read more about Tabletopia widgets in our article.

Here at Tabletopia, we all are big fans of board games – our team never missed Spiel at Essen. And in the current global situation, we are trying to deliver the best experience for online conventions to bring the same offline spirit to online gaming. We hope that board games will still be able to keep us connected and will keep delivering a new and exciting experience to all gamers around the globe!