You may have spent your youth dreaming of a future with flying cars, two-way video wristwatches, and robotic overlords, but my earliest high-tech dreams went in a different direction. Since I first hatched from my nerd egg, I have hoped for a fully functional, long-distance version of Dungeons & Dragons—one in which friends from all over the world can gather in a single, virtual hub, be bossed around by a game-running "dungeon master," and dork out with dice rolls and detailed mini-figurines.

That game's handlers, Wizards of the Coast, have resisted the modern era for far too long, leaving open-source developers to fill the gap with a mix of webcams and simple character-sheet interfaces. But now we're in the virtual reality era, which seems ripe for something a little cooler. Enter the delightfully weird sandbox experience that is Tabletop Simulator VR.

Ars' Lee Hutchinson joined me for a demo of the game's virtual-reality edition, which we launched with admittedly little understanding of what the game actually had on offer. Eventually, after making sense of a messy GUI and some odd function assignments to the HTC Vive wands, we figured out how to play all kinds of tabletop games in virtual reality—and even run our own makeshift pen-and-paper sessions. In the process, we also reverted to our nine-year-old selves of throwing blocks and inappropriately looking at an ogre's crotch.

Tabletop Simulator lets players load up a few rudimentary tabletop classics like chess, checkers (Western or Chinese), poker, parcheesi, and "reversi" (like the branded game of Othello). Create either a public or private instance, then invite up to nine people and start generating games and their appropriate tables. Should you prefer, you can apply a bunch of rules to your instance to prevent griefing and require that players abide by the rules... but Lee and I found that such an approach was for babies.

Instead, we spent most of our time fooling around, generating a bunch of different games and realizing that Tabletop Simulator, by default, shines when you don't follow the rules. It's easy to load a computer version of a board game and assume you'll be limited to only touching your own pieces and having your moves restricted by a taskmaster CPU, but Tabletop Simulator defaults to letting players approach its VR games as if they existed in the real world—meaning, you can pick up your opponents' pieces, then juggle them in mid-air with one hand while throwing them around with your other.

And it's just more fun to play with these tactile games in a room-scale VR environment, in which you can walk around the table, move 3D pieces around the air, and even grow and shrink your VR height so that you're either a Kaiju-level monstrosity or a dice-sized pipsqueak. That scaling is even more fun when testing the game's sandboxy "RPG kit," which comes populated with pre-made monster, hero, terrain, dice, and tile assets. Should players want to try their own VR versions of Pathfinder, D&D, or other pen-and-paper hits, they may want to shrink down to the size of their heroes while the acting DM scales up to be a massive VR puppeteer.

Unfortunately, Tabletop Simulator VR wasn't built to wholly replace your normal pen-and-paper gaming systems. In particular, your DM will want to sit down with a keyboard in his or her lap to take notes and mark dice-roll results in the game's rudimentary text-field interface. You won't find a fully fledged character-sheet system with the kind of GUI tweaks players would want to quickly pick encounter powers or spend action points. Instead, Tabletop Simulator's devs encourage players to generate "tablets"—as in, virtual iPads—and load character-sheet websites onto those.

There's also the matter of our VR session not running smoothly, insofar as we wanted this video to have four players—but neither Kyle Orland nor Peter Bright could get the game's VR version running. This is one of those unfortunate cases where we recommend that HTC Vive owners employ Steam's refund policy as needed.

But what the game lacks in finely built systems, it more than makes up for with a ton of pre-built content, easy paths to introduce your own 2D and 3D assets, and a clean storefront to buy actual games' playsets for virtual play. (In the latter case, only one player has to buy a DLC pack for all of his or her friends to enjoy that playset's content.) Should your pen-and-paper gang of old, now split across the nation or world, want a rudimentary way to talk and goof off in the same room, or if you're a board game creator who wants to test prototypes with developers in other cities, you're in for a satisfying sandbox.

And if you just want to fake like an elementary school goofball, you can do that, too. Lee and I had such a blast playing Tabletop Simulator VR that we lost track of our work days, and as a result, Ars' Jennifer Hahn edited together an additional outtakes video (the second one, above) of us acting as unprofessionally as humanly possible.

Listing image by Sam Machkovech