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.
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.
We will be at UK Games Expo 2024! We will show a demo of our platform for automatically testing tabletop games and first look at our latest work and case studies. We look forward to meeting you at stand 1-654. Get in touch if you'd like to set up a meeting to discuss our services!
We organized a board game playtesting event at Queen Mary University of London on February 17th 2024, and a Game AI Meetup in the evening of February 16th 2024. More information here.
We were at Essen Spiel 2023! We showed a demo of our platform for automatically testing tabletop games. Thank you to all who stopped by booth 4E128. Get in touch if you'd like to set up a meeting to discuss our services!
We were at UK Games Expo 2023! We showed a demo of our work for the first time, with our platform for automatically testing tabletop games. Thank you to all who stopped by stand 2-1069 and shared enthusiasm for what we do!
'’Tabletop R&D has carved an impressive niche for itself by specializing in AI-assisted game testing, which will most certainly be the way of the future. They went above and beyond with their analysis by not only providing an easy-to-follow report document, but also a fully playable web-based app. Their report helped us pinpoint issues with scoring at higher player counts, and this would have been much more difficult to catch in traditional tabletop testing. I wholeheartedly recommend this service.’’ - Charlie Bink, Game Director (Underdog Games)
'’The service from Tabletop R&D was incredibly helpful when. helping us spot patterns of play and dominant strategies. The team were very thorough, explained everything well and it’s certainly helped us to improve the game. We would definitely use the service again in the future, and recommend it to others.’’ - Mark Cooke, CEO (Bright Eye Games)
Founder, Director, Technical Manager
Founder, Director, Project Manager
Research Associate
Software Developer
Research Associate
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