Now that you’re pretty familiar with Tabletop Simulator and past the biggest steps of the learning curve, give yourself a promotion – congrats on making it this far!
Alright, so there’s a bunch of shortcuts and tips to navigating things more smoothly. These are individually minor things that, when put together, can save you a serious amount of time.
Getting a closer look
Panning: W / A / S / D keys
Angling the camera: arrow keys – rotates the camera on an arc to be from the side of the table to above the table
Zoom: ‘up’ with mouse wheel to zoom in, ‘down’ with mouse wheel to zoom out.
See a piece / card: with your mouse cursor over a thing, hold Alt (Cmd for Macs). Note this will only give you that thing, not the stack of cards or pieces on top of it, and it may only show things in the default rotation. You can scroll up or down to make the thing appear even larger, up to a point.
Magnify the table: hold M to produce a magnifying-glass like circle that’s bigger. Better for boards or other situations where ALT doesn’t work as well, since it’ll show multiple elements underneath your ‘lens’. You can scroll up or down to make the thing appear even larger, up to a point.
Manipulate components
Draw cards: with mouse cursor over cards, hit a single number to draw that many cards into your hand. If you type two numbers in a short period of time, you’ll draw that many cards. This can be configured / changed in the settings.
Flip card: with mouse cursor over a thing, hit F.
Rotate card: with mouse cursor over a thing, hit Q (counter-clockwise) or E (clockwise). Each time you hit Q or E, the thing will rotate by a set number of degrees according to the rotation degree counter (see the two-digit number in the upper-left corner – you can toggle that through several options).
Group cards: draw a rectangle around the cards you want to group together (these cards will have a yellow highlighted border), then hit G to group them into one stack.
Shuffle cards / roll dice: R
Other helpful / cool stuff
Pointy arrow: hit Tab to make an arrow wherever your mouse cursor is. Great for pointing out the thing you’re looking at (instead of just ‘over here’ or ‘that card’). Note the designer must have the permission checked to allow players to use it. It’s part of the Ruler tool, and it’s usually checked by default.
Ruler: hold Tab and move your mouse to measure something. Same permission note as above.
Blindfold: hit B – this action will be noted in the game chat and means you won’t be able to see the table or any cards until you hit B again. Great for social deduction games where some players need to close their eyes and others can open them during play.
Search a deck: right click on a deck or bag and click Search. The toolbar pops up a thumbnail of every card in that stack. Hover on a thumbnail for a second and it’ll get bigger automatically. Click and drag a card out of the deck to move it on the table. Note there can be some distortion (this bag holds round tiles, for example).
Set dice to a specific side: with your mouse cursor over a die, hit a number. You can only hit + or – to increment or decrement the dice.
The side in which something enters a bag is the same way it’ll exit a bag. If you put in a bunch of tokens face-down, they’ll come out face-down.
Also, as bags go, one of the recent updates enabled a few different bag orderings: LIFO (Last In First Out), FIFO (First In First Out), and random. Random’s the really exciting one there, personally – now you’ll no longer have to shuffle a bag whenever you add a token. Just right click on the bag, hover over ‘Order’, and left-click on ‘Random’.
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The rest of the Tabletop Simulator series
