Given that I started out my professional era as a graphic designer, I’ve been building my art files for prototypes in Adobe InDesign for over 20 years. There are obvious advantages to this; it’s easy to import slick graphics into it, typesetting control is fantastic, data merge features allow me to pull content from a (properly exported) spreadsheet, it can export pages to PDF or separately saved PNGs, and so on.

I’ve also been using Tabletopia.com as my preferred online/digital prototyping method for several years now. I know, Tabletop Simulator is by far the more widely used platform, but Tabletopia has some notable advantages. For one, it runs in any web browser, so you can share a game with anyone that has an internet connection and a computer. If you’re showing off a prototype, your guest doesn’t even need an account or subscription to Tabletopia, they just click the link you send them and they’re good to go.

Where InDesign and Tabletopia intersect well is the uploading of image content. Flat components like cards, boards, and tokens (and even some non-flat components like custom dice) are all uploaded to Tabletopia’s game-building interface as PNG and/or JPEG files. InDesign does an excellent job of letting you export your components with a variety of options and controls. Make a folder full of great looking card face images with InDesign, import them to Tabletopia as a deck with a few intuitive clicks, and you’ve got a virtual deck to shuffle within minutes.

But for as many advantages Tabletopia offers, Tabletop Simulator (or TTS, as it’s widely known in the board gaming community) is just the universal go-to platform for online board and card games. If I want to digitally demo a new game with someone far away, the first question they usually ask is “is it on TTS?”.

Now, why haven’t I been building my prototypes on TTS in the first place?

Let’s go back to the “browser-based” factor. When I started using Tabletopia, I was working full time at The Op Games, and managing my own playtests for the games I was working on. Tabletopia took a barrier between me and my playtesters out of the way; nobody at the other end needed to purchase or download anything. TTS is a purchased application on the Steam platform, which not everyone has.

Additionally, I use a Mac. TTS requires card images be formatted in a specific way in order to upload them into decks. It’s a precise enough process that they’ve made their own program to process your image files through. Guess what operating system the TTS card formatter has never been ported to? You got it; if you’re working on a Mac, there’s no TTS formatter available. You have to prep all your images manually. If you’re planning on making frequent edits to your cards, there’s a ton of drudge work setting up your images in your future.

For pure accessibility on multiple axes, Tabletopia won the contest for me hands down.

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Fast forward to about two months ago. I picked up a contract project designing a TCG from scratch. There was one other game designer, Dave, signed on to the project, incredibly also in the suburbs south of Seattle very near where I live. We got together one afternoon in a Starbucks to compare early notes on the project and chat about our backgrounds. Midway into the conversation, the Tabletopia/TTS debate came up, and I lamented to Dave that I was beginning to feel resigned to the manual image formatting TTS would require.

“Have you tried Component Studio?”, he asked.

Component whatnow?

Dave explained that The Game Crafter, a service bureau that specializes in print-on-demand board game prototypes, has a website that lets you build prototypes and export them as ready-to-go TTS-friendly files. I think my jaw may have hit the floor. How had I not heard of this?

We talked a little more about what the site could do, and as soon as I got home I jumped on the computer to dig into Component Studio’s info pages. It didn’t take me long to decide I needed an account. For ten bucks a month (roughly the same price as a Tabletopia developer’s subscription), I was about to be able to build all kinds of prototypes and easily export them out to TTS at the drop of a hat.

Before I go any further, let me assure you that whatever this sounds like, it is NOT a piad endorsement.

Much like my old system of using the data merge features of InDesign to create a bunch of templated game cards all at once, I could start with a spreadsheet and import my data directly from that. I could build a visual card template that would automatically populate with the text — and images — specified in that spreadsheet. It could pull directly from a shared Google Sheet, meaning that I could use a file that other designers were able to edit on the fly.

If the Google Sheet was properly formatted for Component Studio, it could be used to update the text on dozens of cards at once, in a fraction of the time it took me to update an InDesign file. This was groundbreaking for me.

Next, I dove into the card template editor.

And discovered it was a far cry from InDesign.

Now, I’ll admit, I’d been using InDesign FOREVER, and changing technical platforms does not come easily to me. But what I found in Component Studio functioned more like a back-end web design tool rather than a visual layout program.

To be fair, it was pretty clear that for a system that functioned directly through a website, basing the modular card template “program” on a flexible website editor was a pretty efficient and effective move. It just wasn’t Adobe.

It took me several days to really get comfortable with the interface. Well, “comfortable” might not be the right word. “Adequate”, maybe? That’s probably closer. I still feel like I’m building a website that looks like a card when I’m hacking my way through template setup. It gets the job done though, and I’ve been a graphic designer long enough that I can usually find ways to style things to the basics of my liking no matter what the tools are. I can create graphics, including full card backgrounds, in the Adobe software I’m accustomed to, then bring those graphic elements into Component Studio as needed.

There have been some recent upgrades to Component Studio, most of which are there to make the user interface more accessible, though I still think any user who knows the ins-and-outs of HTML and Cascading Style Sheets will have a distinct starting advantage over a print designer. Still, with a fair bit of trial and error, I can set up a template and databases that easily spit out everything I need to go directly into TTS, and I get some decent print-and-play files for physical prototypes to boot. And when I run into technical questions I can’t fake my way through, I’ve found their tech guy (available on their Discord server, even on a Sunday morning) and customer service have been responsive and very helpful.

So there it is. I wouldn’t call it a gleaming endorsement (yet), but I do expect that the more I use the system, the more I’ll find to like about it — and there’s already plenty to be happy with. It’s not a perfect layout tool, and it doesn’t come close to the Adobe suite I’m used to, but it gets the job done, and handles stuff I couldn’t do before. And that’s enough for what I need.

Thanks, Dave.

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