Tactility in Tabletop Games
It's a huge part of their enduring appeal
2025/08/29, Zoe
In today’s world of hyper-realistic video games and VR that allow you to fully enter game worlds, why are tabletop games still so popular? The answer is that tabletop games provide a uniquely enriching experience, that’s never going to go away, no matter how much video games improve. That experience is shared play. It’s the feeling of sitting around a campfire with your friends and family, listening to a really good story. Everyone participates in the world-building, even though each person must create that world individually inside their own mind. This is far different from a video game, where every pixel of the world is rendered for you.
Spearhead war scroll card with unit-specific stats and special abilities
As we talked about in a previous blog post, creating and maintaining this shared world requires work (enforcing rules, remembering stats, updating the environment, etc.), and it’s not easy. Key to entering this state, besides proximity with fellow players, are the physical game pieces themselves. Tabletop gamers attest to the power of physical game tokens (cards, dice, minifigures, etc.) to draw them into the world of the game, making the experience more “real”. Rolling a giant handful of dice makes you feel powerful and adds to the drama of your attack. Slapping down a card you’ve kept hidden in your deck is a massively satisfying way to deploy a surprise ability. Personally, I love the feeling of sitting on a strategic development card in Settlers of Catan, mapping out my moves (holding my breath that everything goes according to plan), and then throwing it on the table in a dramatic reveal at the perfect moment. These tactile pieces invite you to suspend disbelief and enter that shared world. This hypnotic element is lost when tabletop games are made entirely digital, and it’s a big part of what distinguishes Scepter as a new type of gaming.
A fully painted Warhammer army and other physical game pieces
For Warhammer players, curating an army and painstakingly assembling and painting each minifigure is part of the fun. Some people collect and paint figures who don’t even play the game! (Maybe they would play if they had Scepter tho… :) ) That’s why it was so important for us to design Scepter to work with the pieces people already use. We also see Scepter as an opportunity to augment the experience of gameplay with physical pieces, by turning those pieces into responsive elements. Imagine if you could reveal a special ability card, throw it on the table, and immediately see its effects on your opponent. This is one of the features we’re currently working on. A card is detected in the video feed of a webcam and then we use computer vision techniques to identify which one it is. Our game engine gets a signal that this card has been deployed and responds accordingly. And then, BOOM! Real-life Yu-Gi-Oh!!
Physical game tokens are just as important to gameplay as the mechanics and rules. We want to augment that experience, not take it away. We’re creating an entirely new category of gaming: keeping the parts people love about tabletop games, getting rid of the parts people don’t like, and adding magical experiences that were never before possible. Our next demo will allow players to use physical cards with Scepter, and then physical dice is after that. So stay tuned!!
