Tablet Tabletopping

Many moons ago, when the second edition of Two Hour Wargames Gladatorial ruleset, "Red Sand, Blue Sky", came out I had a bash with Adobe Flash to make an online-ish board. Some of the functionality did not work with touch devices though. I have just bought an app that will let me play on my Kindle Fire (also on android and ios).

The app is called 3D Virtual Tabletop. It comes pre-stocked with a large number of"paper" figures and a selection of rpg maps. It uses a grid based positioning system so unless your game of choice uses squares for movement you may want\nedd to look elsewhere. For RSBS though this is OK with its simple abstracted movement and positioning. The Kindle version doesn't seem to have developed past an early version, if you use android or ios you'll have more functionality. I'm just going over what I've done to use it for RSBS.

The app lets you import any picture to use as a miniature. The majority of my real gladiators are from the Foundry range, so naturally I headed there to pick up some pictures. With some basic image techniques I managed to single out a variety of gladiator examples to be imported.

The arena from the rulebook was saved as a jpg image and also imported into the map library and applied. The miniatures have a front and a back, the back being a greyscale version of the front image. Looking at the website it would seem other (ie not Kindle) versions give the ability to name the individual miniatures.

It is simple to zoom in and out from the board and spin round the persoective. A nice feature is that when you "rotate" to a pure top down view the miniature view changes to a counter view.

Of course if you are playing "Red Sand, Black Moon" you could be away and playing with just importing the arena.

Just as a final "in case you were wondering" I don't have anything to do with this app, just thought it may be useful for some.