Play 125 board games on your desktop — chess and its many variants, draughts, shogi, xiangqi, go-style territory games, mills, tafl, and more. Tabulon is a free, cross-platform application (Linux, Windows, macOS) built on the Jocly game library, as a Tauri 2 inspired by the abandonned JoclyBoard.
- Play in 2D or 3D — every game offers switchable views, with rotatable, zoomable 3D boards.
- Play against the computer — several AI levels per game, or watch two AIs play each other.
- Play against a friend — on the same machine, or online (see below).
- Learn as you go — each game ships its own illustrated rules page (English/French where available).
- Take your time, or race the clock — configurable game clocks, move history with takeback and replay, and rollback to any earlier position.
- Save and resume — save games to files, reload them later, save favorite setups as templates, and mark favorite games for quick access.
- Capture your games — record a video of the board or take 3D screenshots, right from the app.
- Open as many boards as you like — every game runs in its own window; satellite windows (history, clock, players, possible moves…) follow the one you're playing.
- Use it in English or French — the interface follows your system language.
You can get ready-to-use, pre-compiled versions of Tabulon available for Windows and Linux on the Releases page. Download the package for your platform, install (or unpack) it, and launch — Tabulon works out of the box with a starter selection of built-in games. (Prefer building from source? See DEVELOPMENT.md.)
These pre-built versions are not fixed: the game library of any installed Tabulon can be customized — up to the full 125-game library — in two ways:
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Install extensions (add or remove games) — the easiest way. Open the Extensions screen (hub sidebar, Configuration group) and import downloaded
.tabulon-extfiles. Browse the catalogue:- Modules — whole game families (a module bundles related games and their shared resources; import it with no prerequisite)
- Games — individual games (importing a game requires its module to be installed first)
The "Get extensions…" link in the Extensions screen takes you straight there. Extensions can also be uninstalled from the same screen, so you can add and remove games at any time.
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Replace the game library with a published Jocly
dist— ready-madedistbuilds are published on the jocly2 releases page. Download one and place the complete Joclydist/folder beside the Tabulon executable (or point theTABULON_DISTenvironment variable at it) — no rebuild, no reinstall: Tabulon picks it up at launch.
Two ways to play against a remote human, both from the Players window of any game:
- Through a relay server — create or join a match on a shared relay (compatible with existing joclymatch servers). An invitation screen lets you create a game and hand the match link to your opponent, or join one you received. You can even play against someone using the original jocly-simple-match web page.
- Peer-to-peer, no server at all — one player hosts and gets a short connection code; the other pastes it and the game connects directly between the two machines. Works on a LAN out of the box; across the internet, the host opens a port (or uses any port-forwarding/VPN setup) and can embed the public address in the code. No account, no third party, nothing stored anywhere.
Both modes are marked experimental: they cover normal play well, but takeback/rollback during a remote game can desynchronize the two sides (a limitation stated in the app's design notes).
English and French, auto-detected from your system. Game rules pages are shown in your language when the game provides a translation.
Build instructions, architecture, scripts, extension packaging, the remote-play design history and the test suites are documented in DEVELOPMENT.md (build, internal architecture, remote-play design, scripts, tests).
AGPL-3.0 (see package.json) — Tabulon builds on the Jocly library and JoclyBoard, both AGPL.