Tabletopia has an excellent wiki of how the system works, including some video tutorials. You can find the wiki here: https://help.tabletopia.com/knowledge-base/. Below, we will continuously reference this wiki for further reading rather than reinvent the wheel.

NOTE: To use Tabletopia to its fullest, you are strongly recommended to have an external mouse—rather than a touchpad—with at least a left mouse button and a right mouse button.

Starting a game

To play games on Tabletopia, you must first create an account, which you do here: https://tabletopia.com/signup. For the purposes of this course, a free account will suffice.

One player must create the game room, ‘hosting’ the game, and then share the room to the others. You do so in one of the following ways:

Select a game from Tabletopia’s storefront-like homepage, like Texas Hold’em, or use the near-invisible search bar on the top right. When you are on the game’s own page, click the blue “Play Online” button to create a game room for others to join.
For games not publicly available, such as your prototypes or the No Thanks! game used in Assignment 2, follow a URL which automatically creates a game room for you. Here’s an example URL for No Thanks! https://tabletopia.com/playground/no-thanks-demo-9qurs9/play-now

An image showing the layout of Tabletopia while hosting a session, highlighting the share button and room code.

After the room is created, you need to share the room for the other players to join. Either send them the room ID (underlined pink) or press the Share button (underlined orange) and copy the URL. (To join via room ID, enter it in the Tabletopia search bar and you'll find the room.)

Also note that the host can add more seats to increase the number of players that join.

When a non-host player enters the room, they are shown the current players, the current vacant seats, and a JOIN button. Important: This Join button only makes you a spectator of the game. To actually play in the game, you need to mouse over one of the vacant seats and click the “Take Seat” button that appears.

Screenshot from TableTopia, from the joining player's perspective. Their mouse currently hovers over one of the vacant seats, enabling them to take it.

When everybody’s in, the host can start the game. In doing so, other players will be prompted to click “ready” for the game to start.

Navigating the Tabletop, Playing the Game

For this section, we recommend that you follow the short interactive tutorial that pops up during your first game. In addition, read how to interact with the game components here: https://help.tabletopia.com/knowledge-base/actions-with-game-objects/

For those who prefer, there are also video tutorials here: https://help.tabletopia.com/knowledge-base/video-tutorial/

NOTE: Tabletopia’s tutorials assume using an American/English keyboard layout. As such, the hotkeys might be different (or inaccessible) on your keyboard.

If you want to reference the rules of the game (if any are available), you do so at the bottom left, next to your player avatar.

In short,

Move the camera around with WASD or left mouse button click and drag (if not hovering over an item)
Rotate the camera with right mouse button click and drag (not selecting an item)
Move a game component by selecting it, then clicking and dragging it. If you want to flip it over to see the side that’s toward the table, use the F key.

To put an object in your hand, drag it to the bottom of your screen. The bottom of the screen will highlight in blue; when it does, release the object and it will be placed in an overlay at the bottom of your screen representing your hand. To return it to the table, click and drag the object from your hand to the table.
If you want to place an object face down from your hand on the table, flip it in your hand before putting it down.
You can select and treat multiple objects at once in your hand by clicking them one by one; selected objects are slightly lifted above the rest. To deselect an object, click it again.

More game component interactions, such as shuffling a deck, are available by right clicking the object.
Shift+click a stack to select the entire stack rather than the top item. You can also hold shift and click and drag your mouse over multiple items to select them all.

Put game objects back in their stack by dragging them over to the stack and holding them over it until it flashes yellow.