About

Tabletop R&D is a new company that offers game designers automatic testing services, via the creation of digital versions of tabletop games. We automatically play games thousands of times and extract in-depth gameplay statistics, to answer broad or specific design questions (such as balanced board setups, winning conditions triggering most/least, the estimated power of individual cards etc.). As a supplemental tool for the game development process, we hope to help developers find solid designs that meet their expectations, so human playtesting time can be used most efficiently to determine subjective aspects such as look and feel, fun and engagement. Our Goal: We want to help board game designers create better games, faster. Our tools will contribute to different stages of game development, providing additional insights to your play-testing processes and helping you create robust and balanced games. How do we do it? We create digital twins of board games that allow us to simulate thousands of games in a matter of minutes. We use Computational Intelligence to analyse simulation results and provide you with statistical insights into your game. We can quickly accommodate changes in game design and provide you with updated reports. What is in it for you? As a designer, developer, or publisher, you may get custom answers to questions you have about your game, such as evaluation of different strategies, game balance, frequency and types of actions played, victory conditions triggered most often, etc. Check out our current projects to get an idea of what we can do for you. Responsible Insights: Our automatic methods do not use any data extracted from human play, nor data pulled from public domains. They are also easy to integrate with the current game development process as supplemental tools, and not as a replacement of human labour. The following links show samples of the kind of reports we produce for game designers: - Puerto Rico: https://www.tabletoprnd.co.uk/ukge23/puertorico - Violet and the Grumpy Nisse: https://www.tabletoprnd.co.uk/ukge23/violet - Sirius Smugglers: https://www.tabletoprnd.co.uk/ukge23/sirius