Unlike movies so bad they’re good such as The Room or Trolls 2, you have to interact with a bad game. We can look away from Tommy Wiseau's bare ass or a particularly corny sex scene and the movies keeps trucking along, ready for us when we are. A bad game laughs at you while you struggle with its controls or wade through slow, tedious design. You have to push it along and bear the full weight of its flaws, rarely leaving enough energy left to laugh back. But a few games manage to stay just playable enough, or revel in their badness so much, that they’re still possible to appreciate. 

If you’re the type that can see beyond hideous graphics or nonsensical dialogue and still find something to love in a messy game, then we have a few suggestions for your playlist. 

Earth Defense Force 4.1: The Shadow of New Despair 

EDF thrives on badness. This dead simple game is about blowing up as many alien bugs as you can with comically overpowered weapons, and it's full-tilt ridiculous at all times. But the great part is that its story pretends to take itself seriously, with melodramatic voiceover and dialogue playing out over every mission while you blast giant ants with a rocket launcher. Ugly, simplistic graphics are its most noticeable quality, but those graphics allow EDF to pack hundreds of enemies on screen. That scale is pivotal to how fun and frantic the sandbox combat ends up being.

The bad English VO is really what does it for me, though. It's either delightfully cliche or brilliantly self-aware, but either way, I love love love the clunky voice command system that lets players sing, line-by-line, the EDF anthem. What a game. —Wes Fenlon

Layers of Fear 

Some people will tell you Layers of Fear is a horror masterpiece. I’d guess those people don’t watch much horror. If you don’t know, it’s a first person haunted house game where you play as a tortured artist slowly losing their mind. If anything, I’m less scared of having a psychological breakdown now because I know what to expect: animated baby dolls, hallways that change when you look away, and plenty of messages left on the wall in something that looks like blood. But through its parade of horror cliches, Layers of Fear transcends. 

Once you realize everything can be predicted and that the scares are lined up one after another, each subsequent attempt comes closer to feeling like you’re watching a hooded teen showing you the scary magic they learned online. You’ve seen these tricks hundreds of times over, but the earnesty and enthusiasm with which they’re thrown at you is endearing enough to hang around. Sometimes it will be hard not to laugh (especially when one of the baby dolls sprints down the hall and bonks their head on a dresser), but don’t feel bad. It’s effective horror, just not in the way it was meant to be. —James Davenport

Deadly Premonition 

I’ll start by saying I don’t think Deadly Premonition is bad by any measure, but I’m in the minority. Many are resistant to its sparse, janky-looking PS2-era open world, not to mention the stiffness of its characters. But I love these things: they contribute to the uncanny, edge-of-reality atmosphere this game is so adept at conveying. The sleepy town of Greenvale, Washington is as dream-like and unreliable as its bumbling, goofy characters, and the way protagonist York brushes through these oddities with the calm, authoritative smarts of Twin Peaks’ Agent Cooper (a very obvious inspiration) is hilarious but also, offputting. 

Everything is offputting about Deadly Premonition: the weird repetition of its enemies’ groans, the way they’re too high in the audio mix, make this game feel like outsider art more than a piece of designed mass market entertainment. It’s the closest a game has come to capturing the mood of, yes, Twin Peaks, but also a Franz Kafka novel. It’s a masterpiece the way it is, should never ever be fixed, and if you advocate for the latter then please stay away from this very bad but also perfect video game.  —Shaun Prescott

Tabletop Simulator  

Try hopping into an open D&D server in Tabletop Simulator. It's hilarious, and you will definitely never play D&D. First, the DM will struggle to help everyone manage the custom, editable character sheets. How do you edit your class field? Click on it, which pops a Go piece into existence, then right click on the piece and edit its description in a tiny field that you can't see if you clicked it too near the bottom of the screen. Do that for all the fields. Now find your feature and spell cards in a stack that takes ages to load, but as you're doing that, accidentally drop your character sheet into one of 10 nearby bags and boxes. As the host looks for your sheet, watch their ping skyrocket as they get DDOSed and everyone disconnects. It's D&D, baby!

But Tabletop Simulator is great. For all its many flaws, get a group of friends into a room and you really can play D&D (I doubt it'd be fun to play with strangers anyway). Or you can play any other tabletop game you can think of, so long as you take the effort to make the custom boards, cards, or pieces you need. It's one of the best multiplayer 'sandbox' games on Steam, and it's infinitely customizable. Just be prepared for when someone picks up an unlocked bowl full of dice and it decides to eject all of them like popcorn for some reason.  —Tyler Wilde

Amazing Frog?

Amazing Frog knows what kind of game it’s trying to be—some wacky, unpredictable physics playground for ragdoll frog puppets—but the menus and interactions are so difficult to decrypt that it even fails to be a goofy toy in the way of Goat Simulator. But Amazing Frog somehow works despite itself. Play long enough and you'll eventually get lost in the menus or layers deep into the exploration of its many massive landscapes. Soon, it starts to feel like you’re playing one of the games you see depicted on shitty criminal investigation series. 

Amazing Frog is a videogame that looks and plays like the perfect psychic replica of what my dad things videogames might look and play like. It’s a squeaky toy that weighs 1000 pounds and actively hates you. It’s a jungle gym designed only to be observed. It's an lucid dream at the supermarket. It’s pretty bad, and I like it.  —James Davenport 

Goat Simulator 

Goat Simulator's viral popularity ruined it for a lot of people—it got a reputation as just another dumb game for loud men to be loud at on YouTube. And it is a dumb game, but it's a profoundly, wonderfully dumb game. It takes the part of open-world games people actually like—mindless destruction—and makes that the whole thing. No characters, no cutscenes, no driving to the place where the mission intro happens so you can drive from there to the place where the mission actually starts. Goat Simulator is Grand Theft Auto minus the time-wasting guff. Let's go one better: Goat Simulator is Grand Theft Auto, only with a likeable protagonist.

The thing that made Goat Simulator go viral, the performative aspect of it, is significant too. You don't have to be a streamer to realize it's fun to watch. Get a friend who hasn't played it, sit them down with Goat Simulator, and you'll be laughing together in no time. It's a bit sad that simple pleasure is alien to good games and instead has to come to us via this deliberately bad one made as a joke.  —Jody Macgregor

Resident Evil 6 

I should arguably save this one for a 'games that are so bad they're actually bad' list, but I do have genuine affection for Resident Evil 6. Of its four bloated campaigns, about one-and-a-half are good, and the rest is punctuated by noisy action that doesn't always see the series at its best—the Chris campaign is a particular low point. With some careful editing, Capcom could've had a more refined, balanced action/horror game that cut between the different characters and only kept the best set pieces.

Indeed, the controls in Resident Evil 6 allow for a lot more self-expression and mastery for the player than any previous games. You can slide around, crawl on your back, use deadly melee moves (while keeping a stamina meter in check), perform quick counter shots. It's bad, but it's also good, then. If you've got it in your Steam library, consider giving it a second chance and checking out the Mercenaries mode.  —Samuel Roberts

Ricochet 

Most people don’t even know Ricochet, Valve’s failed multiplayer experiment, exists. A first person disc-thrower set on a series of platforms suspended in an infinite void, Ricochet looks like baby’s first Quake, but with colored jumpsuits and much less variation. At the edge of each platform are a few arrows that shunt you to the next one, or pinball you up to the second level. There’s little room to maneuver on each, which means to take your opponents out you either need to knock them out of the air or ping them off their platform with a disc or two. 

But because Ricochet is so simple, nearly anyone can jump in and start affecting the match. The small play space almost ensures chaos, which is always amusing to watch. Layered over with some lo-fi sound work (and the best death cry in any game ever, maybe), Ricochet may not be much fun to play as a purely competitive FPS, but it sure is entertaining to be a part of, like a loose bolt among a dozen others in a cheap pinball machine.  —James Davenport 

D&D and other tabletop games are best played sprawled across a dining room table, but I wondered how close we could get to that in-person roleplaying experience without spending 10 grand flying PC Gamer's remote staff to my house. I didn't want to just find the most efficient way to play D&D online (see our guide to services like Roll20.net and Fantasy Grounds for that), but to really emulate a tabletop session. So I gathered a few PC Gamer editors from around the US, Canada, and Australia for a little experiment: D&D 5e in Tabletop Simulator. And it worked! Surprisingly well, even. 

Tabletop Simulator is just what it sounds like, a virtual table where game boards, playing cards, dice, figurines, and other objects can be picked up, dealt, rolled, and chucked around. There are built-in rulesets for common games, but everything down to the lighting and individual object physics can be customized. It's powerful—and frustratingly janky, which is why I worried the whole thing might be a bust. If you instinctively hit Ctrl-Z to undo a line you drew, for example, the whole table reloads, and dropping items near boxes sucks them in nearly instantaneously, making all containers dangerous black holes. My players also had atrocious pings, especially our poor indie editor, Jody, who was connecting to me from Australia.

Yet despite a couple disconnects, the session went at about the pace of any in-person D&D session I've played. Tabletop Simulator has some advantages over a real table, too. Players will never have to go searching for a D12, because you can copy and paste 50 of them into a pile if you want. You can quickly upload prepared battle maps, and cover the table with character sheets, DM cheat sheets (which can be hidden from players), and even 'tablets' open to Google Docs or D&D Beyond if you need to look up a spell or monster stats or pass notes to the players.

Our biggest issue didn't have much to do with Tabletop Simulator itself: it was getting over the awkwardness of roleplaying over voice chat. As our heroes began their journey—each of them out of gold, stranded on a dirt road near a remote inn with a storm approaching—they hesitated to speak first to introduce themselves and make a plan. I quickly moved on to a few perception checks followed by a surprise attack to get everyone rolling and making decisions, and after that, the party met a mysterious dwarf and started to loosen up. If we'd gone for a couple more hours, I think the issue may have resolved itself.

Much of the fault for our hesitant start rests on my inexperience as a DM, but the weirdness of the players being disembodied didn't help. In a typical D&D session, they'd be able to make eye contact with the DM before asking questions, or with each other to indicate they're about to speak. We also jumped right into the game without the socializing and feet dragging that typically precedes an in-person game. Next time, I may mix in video chat—it doesn't totally solve the problem, but could help—and make time for chit-chat as I set up the table, so that the players can discuss their characters and get into the right mindset. And rather than the cold open I attempted, I'd have them metagame a little and introduce their characters to each other as players, so that they can more comfortably assume their roles.

The pros and cons of using Tabletop Simulator 

Roll20.net is the cheaper, more practical solution for remote D&D: a clean mapping interface, easy access to official reference material, built-in video chat, and quick dice rolls. More serious players will probably prefer it, and Tabletop Simulator leaves much to be desired despite its frequent patches. Though the Steam Workshop provides a bounty, I'm surprised by how few high-quality fantasy figurines, backgrounds, and table styles are included by default. Clicking links in the tablets sometimes stops working, and the browser is just about featureless: no tabs, no history, no bookmarks. It's also terrible at handling editable text.

So why use Tabletop Simulator? Primarily, to approximate the feeling of being around a real table, with all the goofing off that goes with it: players ignoring the DM and stacking dice, flicking downed monsters off the table, arguing about whether a dice roll was really a roll. And secondarily, because you love spending hours creatively setting up your play space, which I do.

The best thing about Tabletop Simulator is that only the host has to have any Workshop or custom assets used in the game—it's all uploaded to the Steam Cloud and shared with the other players. At the moment, I'm building a multi-layered battle map using hovering boards and a 3D ladder model I imported, and recently, I had some players take on a trio of half-orcs in a game of 'harky,' making them roll d20s to pass and shoot a 'puck' I made by resizing a checkers piece. I'm arguably making it harder for myself by using 3D models and not just a digital pencil, a 2D grid, and a bit of imagination, but the 'physical' space of Tabletop Simulator has only encouraged my creativity, not hampered it. I'm not always going to use maps, but they're useful for keeping track of my more complicated ideas.

As part of the experiment, I also wanted to have as much of my reference material as possible in the game (you can't alt-tab out of a dining room table, and that was the experience I was trying to replicate). So rather than having a physical DM screen cheat sheet awkwardly balanced behind my monitor, or the Monster Manual open in my lap, I put everything I thought I'd need into my Tabletop Simulator setup, including a tablet open to my campaign notes. If you use high-res PNGs as the custom art on in-game 'tiles,' and hold Alt to view them as flat images, or zoom way in, they're perfectly legible. I recently bought the D&D 5e Humble RPG Book Bundle, for instance, created PNGs out of four pages pages of the Kobold Press Book of Lairs, and then created custom tiles in Tabletop Simulator for myself to reference.

It worked just fine, though I wouldn't do it exactly the same way again, as it's much easier to just have a browser window open with my notes. A second monitor (or lots of notes on real paper) is definitely the best friend a Tabletop Simulator DM can have, as running it in a small window or alt-tabbing constantly starts to defeat the purpose, barely differentiating it from easier-to-use browser-based solutions. 

If the simpler route sounds more appealing to you, do try out Roll20.net, as accounts there are free, while Tabletop Simulator is $20 on Steam. But if you've made your decision and you've got a DM and some willing but geographically-restricted players, below is a quick guide to getting started playing remote D&D in Tabletop Simulator, as well as links to some of the tools I've used.

Starting a game of D&D 5e in Tabletop Simulator 

1. Have your players make characters with D&D Beyond's step-by-step character creator. If they don't own the digital Player's Handbook, their options will be restricted as they level up, but it's a good way for newcomers to get started. If they're experienced, they can make their characters manually and send you the details.

2. Both the DM and the players will need to reference the character sheets while playing, and there's lots of ways to make this possible. You can upload a PDF of the sheet to Google Drive, share it publicly for anyone with the link, and then open it in an in-game tablet. You can convert the PDFs to PNGs and create custom 'tiles,' then use Tabletop Simulator's counter tools to keep track of gold pieces, HP, and spell slots. You can transfer the information to these editable character sheets from the Steam Workshop. Or you can just print them out, or open them in another window or monitor.

3. Customize your board in a singleplayer session, making sure to check the option to upload any custom images to the Steam Cloud so that all players will see them (unless they're only for you, the DM). I recommend trying out some the pre-made D&D 5e tables from the Steam Workshop and starting there (I used ffrogman's), as the default tables are too small, and many mods already have a hidden DM area set up with tools like a calculator, dice trays, initiative tracker, and note cards. Note that if you click the vertical '...' in the upper right corner of a Workshop mod, you can 'Expand' it to pull the elements you want into your game rather than loading the whole thing.

4. Save your custom table as a 'game' and load it up when you start your multiplayer session. Make sure to password protect your server, as there's apparently been a wave of DDOSing going around. (On that note, I don't recommend trying to play D&D with strangers in a public server. I tried and it went very poorly.) Be sure to save the board state when you're done, so that everything is preserved for the next session. Make lots of backups and save often while you work, too—it is painfully easy to accidentally load a mod instead of expanding it, losing whatever progress you made.

5. Tips for starting your session:

• Give your players a little time to just hang out and chat. It can take a minute to get into the right mindset.
• Consider letting your players introduce their characters out-of-character. It may help break the ice—which is a little harder to break when disembodied—if they're allowed to set expectations about who they're roleplaying as.
• Set clear rules about what constitutes a dice roll (chucking it on the table, right-clicking and selecting 'roll,' placing it in a dice tower). I have players call their roll before they do it, because otherwise I might interpret a die being dropped on the table as a roll.
• If you're using figurines, name your players' figures (either their name, or the name of their character). Otherwise you'll all have to constantly zoom in to figure out who's who.

Useful tools

Dungeon Painter: Not the best interface, but useful for quickly designing maps that you can export as PNGs and import into Tabletop Simulator. I used the Steam version, plus Photoshop, to make some of my maps.

Inkarnate: A fantastic, free way to quickly create a world map—just sign up for the beta. I imported my world map onto a tile, locked it, and then used the Gizmo tool to prop it up in a corner. Drop a token labled 'You Are Here' on it if you want.

Donjon's fantasy generators: Part of being a DM is thinking on your feet, but when your players really catch you off guard, a little creative assistance can be needed. Donjon offers a great selection of random fantasy and D&D generators. I'll probably get a lot of use out of its random inn generator especially.

RPG Tinker's NPC generator: Need to quickly create an NPC for your players to meet, or generate stats for one you didn't think they were going to fight? RPG Tinker can instantly generate stats and attack abilities for an opponent or ally of any challenge rating.

When people learn I didn't play a proper pen-and-paper game of Dungeons & Dragons until my mid-20s, they usually think my rural Texas upbringing had something to do with it—that my parents feared calling myself Crunchytacos the Horseback Wizard for a few hours at a time might lead to the damnation of my immortal soul. There was a (tiny) bit of that, sure, but the truth is I simply never managed to find anyone else who could imagine high adventure in masses of calculated sums on scratch paper.

How I wish I d had something then like Fantasy Grounds, Roll20, or any one of a number of the "virtual tables" now available that simulate the classic D&D tabletop environment on the PC. The best ones handle much of D&D's busywork, leaving the fun stuff like embarking on fully custom adventures with friends as strong as ever. Better yet, their Internet connectivity means no longer having to hunt down enough people to play with, or losing great D&D friends to distance and circumstance.

Recently, instead of trying to find D&D friends on Craigslist in a part of the US where more people know about bovine palpation than rolling for initiative, I went on a quest to find the best PC tools for running or improving a D&D campaign. Here s what I discovered.

Fantasy Grounds

What it's best at: Authentic D&D campaigns with licensed modules; extensive customization, if you develop the programming skills necessary to write your own rulesets and character sheets.Website: Fantasy Grounds | Price: $40 per license, or $150 for an Ultimate license that can run the game for multiple players.

Fantasy Grounds comes highly recommended among D&D players—including Jordan Thomas, the creative director for BioShock 2 and senior writer for Bioshock Infinite. Several times a month, he uses it to play D&D with other professional writers who've worked on games like Halo and Borderlands.

He especially admires it because it offers official D&D modules from Wizards of the Coast. The robust virtual tabletop snagged the license back in 2014, and since then the developers have embraced the concept as giddily as a gelatinous cube sweeps up tunnels. It's all right here, down to automatic calculations for resists from the 5th edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and even licensed modules for other RPGs like Call of Cthulhu and Castles & Crusades. And the best part? As Thomas says, "All I really have to do is plug them in."

The game files are stored on your computer, so you don't have to worry about fiddly things like server crashes and online storage space for tokens. It's also available on Steam, and while it doesn't offer any kind of in-game Looking for Group tool, Fantasy Grounds' forums buzz with helpful Dungeon Masters advertising games familiar and obscure. It's a shame there's no built-in webcam support, but most groups do fine using a third-party service like Skype or, in Thomas' case, GoToMeeting.

Fantasy Grounds offers official D&D modules from Wizards of the Coast.

Yet if you plan on playing Dungeon Master and taking advantage of Fantasy Grounds' huge range of options, dig in your heels and brace yourself for a decent learning curve. Sure, it allows you to make house rules and character sheets, but only if you know programming like Steph Curry knows basketball. Even as a player, I found it still took hours to feel my way around. Fortunately, Fantasy Grounds boasts a ton of video tutorials in its wiki.

The catch? It costs a dragon's hoard. The single license costs $40, but you'll end up paying $120 if you want to buy four more licenses for other friends to play with you. The price goes up further when you tack on the D&D modules themselves, which start at $20 for some campaigns and jump to $50 each for class and monster packs.

It's not as bad as it sounds in practice, as much of this works out to similar costs as the printed materials from Wizards of the Coast. In fact, many serious DMs are like Thomas, who opted the $149 Ultimate License (also available monthly for $9.99), which lets any and all invited players join the fun, even if they've only downloaded the free demo client.

Roll20

What it's best at: Can run virtual campaigns or augment pen-and-paper ones. A dynamic lighting system tracks player vision and integrated video/voice chat simplifies online play.Website: Roll20 | Price: Free, or $5 per month for a premium account that supports up to 1GB of uploadable assets for customization.

If all that talk of money frightens you, take heart: Roll20 is free and fun. It may not have official Dungeons & Dragons modules, but it does have user-made D&D projects as well as native support for webcams, freehand drawing, Google Hangouts, and a "3D Quantum Roll" that (get this) grants true randomness "based on the power fluctuations of a split beam of light." It boasts a "jukebox" that lets you yank music and ambient sounds from SoundCloud's full library (although it won't let you upload your own music), and it allows a dizzying range of customization for maps, tokens, and more. Its menus are a bit drab, but they're intuitive almost to the point of genius, and the package is especially celebrated for its fantastic line-of-sight dynamic lighting system.

Its menus are a bit drab, but intuitive almost to the point of genius.

Small wonder that over a million players reportedly use Roll20 regularly. The forums are full of helpful players happily answering even the most noobie questions, and it has a built-in tool that easily lets players find open games of their choosing. Importing is a breeze.

That's a pretty big list of pluses, but Roll20 isn't without a few drawbacks. For one, it's browser based, which means your gameplay's subject to the vagaries of the server. It may cost nothing up front, but the free version restricts you to 100 MB for uploadable assets; to get 1GB, you'll need to fork over $4.99 a month or $49 per year. You also can't use the dynamic lighting functions unless you pay the sub, although you'll still have a fog of war option if you choose not to pay.

But these are hardly deal killers. And if you're relatively new to D&D and want a friendly place to hop in, Roll20's probably the best place to do it outside of a dining room table with friends.

Tabletop Simulator

What it's best at: Fully simulating the tabletop experience, including the table. Extensive mod support allows for playing a variety of games, from D&D to chess.Website: Tabletop Simulator | Price: $20

Tabletop Simulator let me play a brief session of D&D in Skyrim's Jorrvaskr longhall with a Steam Workshop mod, and I'm tempted to call it the best based on that experience alone. It's certainly the most literal of the virtual tables: upon booting it up after forking out $20, I found myself standing around what looked like a real, physical (if slightly pixelated) table. When I found I could scoop up the dice and throw them across a huge range of customizable 3D boards with satisfying tumbles, I briefly ceased to care about how little it offered in the way of automation.

It doesn't hurt that the whole business is beautifully moddable, allowing the creation of room-sized tables complete with rulesets lining the board. When I tried to import a map I'd sketched out on paper and uploaded to Imgur, I found I only needed to link the file's URL in a little menu for it to show up on the playing surface.

Too bad that these pretty boards and their huge files and multiple pieces sometimes hobble the pace on weaker machines. Tabletop Simulator just isn't that friendly to pen-and-paper RPGs in general, in fact, as much of the work still has to take place on actual paper. It's got cool animated figures like trolls and goblins in its RPG set, but preparing the areas take a load of time and creating effects like a fog of war require an extra bit of GM interaction. It's definitely a looker, but probably best used for D&D as a dice roller at best.

It does offer one huge advantage, though: if you're sick of how a session is going, you can flip the table and send the pieces flying into the virtual wind.

MapTool

What it's best at: Extensively customizable, but you'll need real programming knowledge to get much out of it. Also, free.Website: MapTool | Price: Free

It only takes one second to understand why the free Java-based MapTool calls itself "the Millennium Falcon" of RPG software. I mean, God, look at it. It's like a relic from the days when Geocities was bigger than Kanye West, and it sometimes plays like it, too.

Though it's improved in recent years, it's still subject to a frightful number of disconnects and Java issues, which can leave players throwing up their hands and refusing to play until everyone switches over to Roll20.

But yes, it'll get you where you want to go. Just don't expect record-breaking Kessel Runs. It's powerful, offering both dynamic lightning and automatic calculations as well as a pile of other features, but if you want to use it for anything more intensive than a virtual map, you're going to have to know how to code and spend a lot of time doing it.

The good news is that its strong open-source community has already handled most of the tough stuff (and provided links for it), but it's still comparatively rough territory for novice DMs. There's also a new app based on MapTool's open-source code called Mote, and while it offers many some improvements, it's still very much a work in progress

Quest on

Keep in mind that all this says little about the wealth of tutorials sprawling across YouTube and on the official forums for each service, and it excludes a host of lesser known virtual tables like d20Pro, OpenRPG, the Gametable Project, and Battlegrounds: RPG Edition, all of which have their own unique appeal.

None of these fully supplant the magic of playing with a classic table group, not even AltspaceVR, which brings virtual tabletops to virtual reality. But they solve problems that were unsolvable just 20 years ago, and they ease the journey in for newcomers. Happy hunting.

Gwent is a collectible card game playable within The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The odds are good that you've heard of it; it's enormously popular as these things go, and in fact a couple of Witcher 3 developers released a brief Gwent tutorial video earlier this week. At the end of that post, I suggested that it would be awfully nice if CD Projekt released a standalone version of Gwent, so we could keep on Gwenting after the Witchering was over. And it hasn't—but someone else has.

Back in May we drew your attention the looming launch of Tabletop Simulator, a simulator of a table atop which you can play "real" games: card games, dice games, chess, or whatever floats your boat. It came out of Early Access earlier this month, and now, thanks to the efforts of Steam user [MeoW] Mr.RiZZaH , you can get your Gwent on as well, by way of his unofficial T-Sim mod.

It's a two-player mod, so you can't pass a few idle minutes playing against the computer, and as it's unofficial, there will likely be some technical issues that pop up now and then. The creator also had to come up with his own rules for deck building, since it's not possible to import them from the game or collect them from the bodies of people you kill in the real world. On the other hand, the comments, while few in number, are very positive.

And it's free! So why not, right? Especially if you already own Tabletop Simulator. Otherwise, it's currently marked down to $13/ 10 as part of the Steam Summer Sale, which is now underway.

Tabletop Simulator is just what it sounds like: A simulated table, atop which you can play virtual versions of real-world games. It comes with 15 classics, like chess, poker, and dominoes, as well as an RPG kit with animated figurines, and players can create and share their own games via the Steam Workshop. There's even an option, as demonstrated by extremely popular YouTuber Tyler Wilde, to flip the table.

Tabletop Simulator hit Steam Early Access in April of 2014—we took a look at it not long after it went live—and yesterday the developers at Berserk Games announced that it will go into full release on June 5. But that won't mean the end of development, as the studio still plans to implement VR support, a Space Theme Pack, a mobile version, and other features and fixes that will inevitably prove necessary.

The studio also announced a deal to develop Superfight, a card game about battles between fictional superheroes created by Robert Kirkman's Skybound Entertainment, into official Tabletop Simulator DLC. "The entire Skybound team is thrilled to expand the universe of Superfight with Tabletop Simulator," Skybound Interactive President Dan Murray said. "We look forward to seeing Superfight live in the digital world for years to come."

Tabletop Simulator is still available on Early Access for $15/ 11, but will bounce to $20/ 15 at launch. The Superfight DLC will sell for $10/ 7, and will also be available on June 5.