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Article By Gothic Frog

Sorcery on Tabletop Simulator: A 2026 Setup Guide

Buy TTS, subscribe to the official mod, import a Curiosa deck, find League opponents — the Sorcery online setup walkthrough, current as of June 2026.

tools online-play tts

There is exactly one sanctioned way to play Sorcery: Contested Realm over the internet: Tabletop Simulator, running the publisher's official mod, with opponents found through a matchmaking Discord. The online-play overview maps that landscape — what exists, what doesn't, and what a match actually feels like once you're in one. What follows is the deeper version of the setup itself: every stage from an empty Steam library to a registered League player, with the dates, IDs, and known snags written down.

Five stages. Buy Tabletop Simulator. Subscribe to the mod. Load the table. Get a deck onto it. Find someone to play. None of it requires owning a single physical card.

Sorcery TTS League Season 10 announcement banner

Sorcery TTS League Season 10 announcement banner — via sorcerytcg.com

Stage 1: Buy Tabletop Simulator

Tabletop Simulator is a physics sandbox by Berserk Games, on Steam since 2015. It isn't a Sorcery product — it's the platform the Sorcery mod runs on, the way a kitchen table is the platform the paper game runs on.

The price is $19.99 on the Steam store page as of June 2026. Steam discounts it routinely during seasonal sales, so if you're not in a hurry, wishlist it and wait a few weeks. There's also a 4-pack at $59.99 — the per-copy math works out if you can rope in three friends, and a playgroup that buys in together solves the find-an-opponent problem in advance.

Two things worth knowing before checkout:

  • Every player needs their own copy. The Sorcery mod itself is free Workshop content, but TTS is the ticket in for each person at the table.
  • The hardware bar is low. The store page asks for 4 GB of RAM, a DirectX 10-capable graphics card, 3 GB of storage, and a broadband connection. Current OS floors are Windows 10 64-bit (21H1+), macOS 12+, or Ubuntu 22.04/24.04. Most laptops from the last decade clear it.

Stage 2: Subscribe to the official mod

The mod is Sorcery: Contested Realm, Workshop ID 2884846136, published and maintained by SorceryTCG — the publisher's own Steam account, with the official Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube channels linked from the listing. It has been live since November 5, 2022, and it is actively kept up: 49 updates as of the listing accessed June 6, 2026, the most recent on March 22, 2026, with 10,845 current subscribers and a five-star rating across 318 reviews.

Click Subscribe on the Workshop page while signed in to Steam. The mod downloads automatically the next time you launch TTS.

One real-world snag: Workshop search doesn't reliably surface the mod. Comments on the listing going back to 2024 — and as recently as May 2026 — ask why it can't be found by searching inside TTS or the Workshop. Whatever the cause, the workaround is simple: use the direct link above, or go in through the SorceryTCG account's Workshop files. If a friend says they can't find it, send them the URL.

What's in the mod tracks the paper game:

New sets ship as updates to the same listing, so an old subscription picks them up automatically. If you subscribed in 2023 and are coming back now, you don't need to re-subscribe — launch TTS and let it sync.

Stage 3: Load the table

From the TTS main menu: Create → Singleplayer (for poking around alone) or Create → Multiplayer (to host a game), then Workshop → Sorcery: Contested Realm.

The first load takes longer than you'd expect. The Workshop download itself is tiny — the listing reports it at under 200 KB — because the heavy assets, the card images, stream in when the table first loads. On a slow connection that can mean blank or gray cards for a stretch. Let it finish; later loads pull from cache and are much faster. If cards stay blank or the table refuses to load at all, the standing community fix is unsubscribe → resubscribe → relaunch.

Once loaded, you can play immediately: the mod includes the four Beta preconstructed elemental decks, which is the standard way to learn the table before you bother with importing. Expect your first game to run slow — TTS hand-skills (tapping is a right-click rotation, the camera takes getting used to) are their own small learning curve, separate from Sorcery's.

Stage 4: Import a deck from Curiosa

This is the step that turns TTS from a demo into a testing ground. Curiosa.io — the official deckbuilder, covered in depth separately — is where the deck actually gets built; it sits in the directory's Deckbuilders & Tools shelf alongside the smaller utilities that orbit it.

The flow:

  1. Build or clone a deck on Curiosa. Anything public works — your own brew, a precon list, a deck someone linked in Discord. You don't need to own the cards.
  2. Copy the deck's URL.
  3. Paste it into the mod's deck importer. The importer lives on the table itself rather than in a TTS menu, and its exact label and position have moved between mod versions — scan the table surface near your seat rather than hunting menus, and treat the mod's own on-table notes as the current reference.
  4. The deck spawns assembled — Spellbook and Atlas in their zones, ready to play.

That flow is the whole pitch for online Sorcery: any list you can read, you can pilot tonight at zero card cost. Testing a deck on TTS before buying the singles is standard practice in this community, and it's the cheapest scouting tool the game has.

Stage 5: Find opponents — the Sorcery League

You can browse public TTS lobbies and hope, but the structured answer is the Sorcery League — the publisher-promoted online league played on TTS, organized by Ira Fay, Sorcery's Codex Keeper. The Season 10 announcement (January 12, 2026) lays out the model:

  • Free to enter. Registration is a short form linked from each season's announcement post.
  • A dedicated League Discord handles matchmaking — signal the bot when you're ready and it pairs you with another available player. The pool is global, so someone is usually awake.
  • No required game count. Play one match or thirty.
  • Eight or more matches during a regular season (roughly seven weeks) qualifies you for participation rewards, and a top cut follows for those chasing prizes.
  • Swapping decks between matches is allowed and encouraged — it's a testing league as much as a competitive one.

Fay's framing in the announcement is the right read on what the League is for: "try ideas you'd never bring to a tournament, meet players from around the world, and engage with the game at your own pace."

Two timing caveats, date-stamped. Season 10 opened January 12, 2026, and at roughly seven weeks per regular season it has run its course; no Season 11 announcement had been posted on sorcerytcg.com as of June 6, 2026. Seasons have recurred for years — the announcement is literally titled "The Realm Reopens" — so the practical advice stands: check sorcerytcg.com/news for the current season's post, because the registration form and Discord invite rotate each season and old links die.

Between seasons, matchmaking happens in the community servers — the Official Sorcery Discord runs open TTS games, and the specialty servers each have their own pickup channels. The directory's Discord Servers section keeps the live invite links, which beats digging them out of expired announcement posts.

Sealed, Draft, and the 4-player table

Constructed isn't the only thing the mod runs. The October 2024 update that brought Arthurian Legends also added Limited play — Sealed and Draft — and the listing now tags support for up to eight players. If you've never built from packs, the Sealed walkthrough covers the format itself, and the format guide places Sealed and Draft against Constructed. The mod is the zero-cost place to practice either before an event where the packs are real.

There's also a separate 4-player variant (Workshop ID 3166403381), and it deserves a clear-eyed note: it's a community build by a Workshop user (=BLUBX=TheDr.), not a SorceryTCG release. Posted February 2024, around 1,000 subscribers, a single change note since launch, and a February 2026 comment reporting errors in 4-player hotseat. Remote playtest groups have used it happily for free-for-all games, but treat it as community freeware outside the official pipeline.

When it breaks

The short list, drawn from the mod's comment thread and the standing community answers:

  • Mod won't load, or loads a stale version → unsubscribe, resubscribe, relaunch TTS. Clears most cache problems.
  • Blank or frozen cards → usually the first-load asset download still running, or a hiccup in it. Wait it out, then try the resubscribe cycle.
  • Friends can't find the mod in Workshop search → known discoverability quirk; send the direct link.
  • Can't find the import button → layouts shift between updates. Check the on-table notes first; failing that, a recent video walkthrough from one of the community's YouTube channels is the fastest way to see the current table.

And the structural reminder from the overview: nothing in TTS enforces the rules. No engine pays your mana, checks your threshold, or polices combat — both players do. Budget your first sessions accordingly, and read the room on take-backs; the community is generally relaxed about them.

The checklist

  1. Buy Tabletop Simulator on Steam — $19.99 as of June 2026, cheaper in sales, one copy per player.
  2. Subscribe to Workshop ID 2884846136 by SorceryTCG — direct link, not Workshop search.
  3. Launch TTS → Create → Workshop → Sorcery: Contested Realm, and let the first load finish.
  4. Learn the table with a Beta precon, then build on Curiosa and import by URL.
  5. Find the current Sorcery League season via sorcerytcg.com/news, or pick up games through the community Discords.

If you're earlier in the journey than any of this — still deciding whether the game deserves your table time at all — the directory's Start Here shelf is the gentler on-ramp, and Is Sorcery Worth It in 2026? makes the case both ways. But if you've read this far with Steam already open: the whole setup is one purchase, one subscription, and one deck URL. The Realm is contested nightly.

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