Once you’ve given your prototype a few playthroughs to see if it even makes sense, you’ll likely want to play it with some other people. Thankfully, Tabletop Simulator makes this all pretty easy!

Remember how you typed in the filename of your card image? You can paste in a url in those boxes instead. Many use free services like Imgur to host their files for use in TTS. Others use the handy-dandy Steam Cloud uploading functionality included in the application itself. I use something else.

First, the problems with the more popular options. Imgur (and most free image hosting services) give you a url pointing at the image file itself, which is great. But they tend to not allow you to replace an image with an updated version. This means that when you want to make changes or add a card, you need to re-import the whole deck.

Steam Cloud is similar. It does make the uploading process a tad easier by including it within the application, but you still need to re-import, and you still have old versions hanging around for you to clear up.

There is another service I recommend checking out. It’s free, it hosts images, lets you overwrite them, and—most importantly—it keeps the urls exactly the same. This means you can just upload your new version, reload the game, and the new cards and tweaks you made appear, just like that.

How To Get It Set Up

Click the following link: Github.com. Yes, it’s a code source control system, and no you’re not storing code. But it doesn’t care if you want to store images, too. So just bear with me, and you should see how easy it is to use.

Sign up for free, confirm your email address, all that jazz. Once you’re logged in, there’s a big “+” icon in the top-right of the page. Click that to open a little menu and hit the “New repository” link. Type in a name for your project and an optional description.

Oh, and make sure you check the “Initialize this repository with a README” box. If you don’t, it’ll royally mess the whole thing up and you’ll need to make a new repo. It’s just a thing. Don’t worry about it.

Then press the “Create repository” button at the bottom. Now you have a place to put all your files.

Side note: if you want to make a folder structure to put stuff in, you can totally do that. Click “Create new file” and in the “Name your file…” box, type in the name of the folder, plus a back slash ( / ), then some random name of a file. I use a dash, but it really doesn’t matter. This is just to coax the system into making a folder for you. Then press “Commit new file” at the bottom. The file list now shows the folder you made. Click on it to look at the files there or upload files directly to that folder, etc., etc.

If you press the “Upload files” button near the top, you can drag in your image files and watch them upload in a few seconds. Then press the green “Commit changes” button at the bottom to finish the process. (Think of this as ‘saving changes.’)

Now that the files have been uploaded, you can click on them in the file list to open that file. Then there’s a “Download” button in the top-right of that page. This is a direct link to the image file itself. So if you click on it and copy the url from the address bar, or right-click to copy the url… you’ll have the url!

Just paste it in the import dialog within TTS and set up your cards again, and you’re sorted. And when you need to update that image, just upload an image with the same name into the same folder, and it’ll get overwritten.

Come to think of it, maybe there’s an easier way to update the cards without moving them at all… (Stay tuned for more on this!)

This makes it way easier to change cards, and—by using the ideas spoken of in my previous blog on this topic—even adding cards. And hosting OBJ files and other images is just as easy.

Note that online images are “cached” (saved on your machine for quicker access in the future). So when you make changes to the online version, you may need to disable “Mod Caching” in the settings, reload, then re-enable it. Just click the settings and there should be a checkbox halfway down the first page you see.

Once you’ve got your cards all set up again, you can save the game. Then to play with another player, just host a server in the app and give that person the password to get into it. Once you’re into the server you can simply load up your game and TTS will do the same on their end, downloading those same image files and creating those same cards.

GL HF GG!