HN Gopher Feed (2017-11-29) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Vassal - Online Adaptations of Board Games
129 points by evo_9
http://www.vassalengine.org/index.php___________________________________________________________________
kolanos - 18 minutes ago
Anyone aware of one of these board games sites that makes it a
priority to be accessible? I'm visually impaired, so would benefit
from anything visual also having a text/audio component. Also a lot
of these are drag-and-drop, so having an alternative way to move
things around would be helpful. Obviously some games wouldn't
translate well to a non-visual medium, so that's why I ask.
konpikwastaken - 11 minutes ago
Worth mentioning here for any interested parties is OCTGN [1], or
"Online Card and Tabletop Gaming Network".Interesting history - it
started out from a VB6 application (specifically for playing Magic
the Gathering) maintained by a single guy, he then handed dev off
and the entire application was rewritten as a C# WPF application
and was in hot competition with Magic Workstation directly for some
time [2], which ultimately IMO made it a much better product. I
believe I actually still have the original VB6 source on an old HDD
somewhere... If I find it, wondering how to best archive it, or
would anyone even care?Anyway, OCTGN is currently a generic
"tabletop game" program that allows for new games to be defined via
the documented game format [3] and even supports python
scripting.[1]: https://github.com/octgn/OCTGN [2]:
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/other-...
[3]: https://github.com/octgn/OCTGN/wiki#create-games-on-octgn
nicolodavis - 1 hours ago
Vassal has two main limitations: - It requires a download (not web-
based). - Most games still require you to manage the board state
yourself.Like someone else pointed out, boardgamearea.com,
yucata.de and (my favorite) http://play.boardgamecore.net/ also
manage the game state for you.I've been working on a (very early
stages still) rules engine that will hopefully make it easier for
more websites like the above to pop up in the future:
https://github.com/google/boardgame.io
IpV8 - 1 hours ago
I love this idea. A quick tutorial on how to use this would make
it much more approachable to developers wanting to use it without
reading every line of code.Also, why is it copyrighted by google?
nicolodavis - 1 hours ago
You can find a tutorial here:
https://google.github.io/boardgame.io/I'm a Googler, so
released it under Google's open source program (it's not an
official product, though).
blue1 - 2 hours ago
I don't know if it has become better in the meantime, I tried it
some years ago and found that it's a nice idea but in practice most
modules (i.e. games) are rather primitive implementations.
smaili - 43 minutes ago
Slightly off topic but it's always interesting to run into open
source projects that continue to be hosted on Sourceforge
b0rsuk - 24 minutes ago
Inertia ? Vassal has always been on Sourceforge.I don't see much
benefit in using Java for board games, especially in a client-
side app where server resources are not an issue. Vast majority
of board games are turn-based with alternating turns. The
bottleneck is player input. A more expressive language like
Python would work better in my opinion. Inertia, I guess. Java
was all the rage back then.
ignu - 2 hours ago
The problem with VASSAL and Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia is
that... it's awkward to play a real time board game online.There's
a lot of down time while everyone else takes their turn. You have
to set aside one to three hours to play uninterrupted. In real
life, you have the benefit of hanging out with these people as you
play.However, I've become a huge fan of http://www.yucata.de/ and
http://boardgamearena.com recently and not playing games in real
time. Making one or two turns a day means there's no down time, and
I can be much more flexible making my move(s) fit into my schedule.
RangerScience - 53 minutes ago
> There's a lot of down time while everyone else takes their
turn.Play more simultaneous-play games. Captain Sonar, Space
Alert, Galaxy Truckers, and Sidereal Confluence are all really
good games with basically no downtime.
maerF0x0 - 1 hours ago
Use skype/facetime/hangouts to make it more fun. Then you can
talk live kind of like in person
eterm - 2 hours ago
What is awkward with things like table top simulator is when they
don't have a rules engine, so you don't get the benefit of
learning edge cases through the game engine and don't get the
bookeeping sped up, so you still have to watch everyone else take
their turn to make sure they're not accidentally sneaking
resources.boardgamearena has the advantage of actually having
rules engines so you can also relax more while playing knowing
the engine is taking care of the rules freeing you up to making
tactical mistakes instead of rule mistakes.
reificator - 44 minutes ago
Tabletop Simulator has an exposed Lua interpreter that any mod
can take advantage of. The games can come with rules or not.I
much prefer the ruleless approach of TTS to be honest. It
gives you that tactile sense of actually moving pieces around
the board and interpreting the rules yourself that makes a
board game feel like a board game. But with undo and instant
setup and without the requirement that everyone be in the same
place.Not that it's a great tabletop game, but have you ever
played a PC version of Monopoly? It's the most boring way to
play an already incredibly boring game.My only issue with
Tabletop is that all the games I want to play with friends (and
that at least one of us owns physically) keep getting DMCAed.
That's fine in and of itself, but if a company is going to stop
people who own their game from "pirating" it, it'd be nice if
they'd make it available legitimately as DLC.
Woofles - 1 hours ago
My friend used to play games on Tabletop Simulator. It's a good
way to play with friends who don't live near you, but beyond
that it's definitely a worse experience than playing board
games in person. I don't have any experience playing with
people that aren't friends, so I can't speak to the cheating
aspect of it.
eterm - 1 hours ago
I too play with friends but it's not outright cheating that's
an issue, it's usually more innocent than that, just edge
cases or forgetting about less common rules, especially in
more complex games like Eclipse or through the ages. It's
easy to forget a rule that only applies in selective
situations but which can have far reaching consequences.It's
nice to relax and have the engine take care of it, and by
pushing things you can actually learn odd interactions you
wouldn't have discovered through reading the rule-book.
Woofles - 57 minutes ago
I totally understand where you're coming from. I don't
think I've played any games where it's made a large enough
difference (in person or online).I also love the idea that
it will resolve things correctly right away instead of
having to look at the rulebook every time you run into some
crazy edge case or wording confusion.
reificator - 42 minutes ago
Games on TTS can absolutely come with the rules built in
via the exposed Lua interpreter. Mods can automate as
much as they'd like.
chromanoid - 1 hours ago
I totally agree. Brettspielwelt and Yucata also automate and
ensure the gameplay according to the rules.
chromanoid - 2 hours ago
Also nice: https://m.brettspielwelt.de/
Woofles - 1 hours ago
The main thing I've found about playing games not in real time is
you are always able to min-max every move. Since I don't
necessarily play every game to win (I try to win, but if I don't
it's not a big deal) I enjoy the arbitrary time constraint of
playing in real time. Makes things move along and gives games
more of a lighthearted feel.Also it's only three games, but I
play Food Chain Magnate a lot and you can only play it online
here: http://play.boardgamecore.net/
jaryd - 42 minutes ago
Hooray for FCM :)
beefsack - 35 minutes ago
On the topic of online board games, I've been really interested in
the idea of a pure play-by-email (PBE) system where there isn't a
frontend or web interface at all. By that, I mean that a full game
rendering is emailed to each player, and they take their turns by
replying to the email with the commands they wish to execute.I
started one in Go a number of years ago[1] and I feel I managed to
prove to myself that a pure email interface is possible and
actually really convenient in some cases. I even managed to
implement over 20 games[2]. It was only ever used in my closed
circle of friends, but we played thousands of games and many found
it simple to participate in slow periods at work or school.If
anything, my biggest takeaway was that if you want to really reach
a level of expertise in a new technology, you need to find a
project that you can pour your heart into. I've probably breached
100k LOC for the project and I've been working on it for over half
a decade. I'm currently redoing the project in Rust as an attempt
to become highly skilled in that[3].[1]
https://github.com/Miniand/brdg.me[2]
https://github.com/Miniand/brdg.me/tree/master/game[3]
https://github.com/brdgme
snekops - 9 minutes ago
This is really cool, thanks for sharing.How do you find Rust for
this code base compared to Go?
beefsack - moments ago
The main reason why I wanted to switch from Go to Rust was I
was finding the type system a bit too weak for game
implementations. There were even some games I was having
trouble implementing at all without resorting to `interface{}`
throughout the data structures.Rust has been a challenge but
now that I'm fairly proficient it's very well suited to
implementing the game data structures. Parsers are much more
pleasant to implement in Rust too; I've written a custom parser
combinator for game input and it's much easier to handle input
in Rust than it is in Go.
samdk - 8 minutes ago
This is not the same thing, but you might be interested in taking
a look at the excellent online Terra Mystica implementation
(https://terra.snellman.net/) if you haven't seen it already.It's
a web interface, but the underlying representation is text-based,
and you can type in the commands directly if you want. This leads
to some nice features--for example, you can plan your moves
several steps ahead of time, and you get a game log for
free.There creator wrote a blog post about that particular design
decision: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-12-08
-command-lan...
beefsack - 3 minutes ago
Yeah, in my experience having a pure text interface proves to
be a very complex design challenge but it enables so much cool
stuff. One interesting side effect is that it makes writing
bots quite simple.
miiiiiike - 35 minutes ago
Speaking of online adaptations of board games.. My Massively
Multiplayer Adaptation of Codenames was just approved for public
consumption by its illustrious creator, Vlaada Chv?til today!Sign
up and help me test out Django Channels in production!TL;DR: An
MMOBG based on Codenames! - Sign up form: http://codewords.io/ -
FAQ: http://codewords.io/faq/I needed to learn a few new
technologies (TypeScript, Angular 4, Bootstrap 4, Django Channels.)
Building the same chat room app that everyone builds as their first
demo using these technologies sounded tedious. I decided to build a
Massively Multiplayer Online Board Game instead.If you'd like to
help with a stress test or participate in a game, there's a sign up
form up here: http://codewords.io/I'm going to try to get Vlaada to
host a game with me, but, he's a busy guy. If he's unavailable I'll
find someone almost as interesting to play with us.If you'd like to
know more, I put up an FAQ over there: http://codewords.io/faq/
(you can skip to the gameplay FAQ by tugging on this:
http://codewords.io/faq/#how-work)Screenshots and a gameplay
overview can be found somewhere under here:
https://imgur.com/a/3xtZC
tomcam - 1 hours ago
Wonderful! When I was a kid before the microcomputer age I was a
fan of exotic games like Turkish and Japanese chess. I had to make
pieces using bread dough clay. Not fun.
dmcginty - 27 minutes ago
Given the name I was expecting this to be affiliated with Tom Vasel
(founder of The Dice Tower and notable game reviewer) in some way,
but it seems to be completely unrelated.
miiiiiike - 25 minutes ago
And all around good guy. Have you met him in person? He's
shockingly tall. Taller than you would think possible from his
videos. I saw him again at PAX Unplugged last week... I'm always
surprised by just how impossibly tall he is.
dmcginty - 2 minutes ago
I met him at Gencon this year, but I didn't realize who he was
at the time. I only listen to the podcast, so I didn't
recognize him. He was sitting on a Rathskellers gaming table
and I started asking him about the table. It was only when some
people asked for a photo that I realized who he was.
fenwick67 - 1 hours ago
What I'd love is a FOSS alternative to Roll20, which is namely for
tabletop RPGs.
mhd - 18 minutes ago
Have you tried MapTool? It's not an online service but a
client/server Java tool, but if you're not e.g. looking for a new
group it's good enough for scripting rules and displaying maps.
orcusz - 17 minutes ago
I haven't used Roll20 in some time, but you might be interested
in MapTool (http://www.rptools.net/toolbox/maptool/). It's FOSS
and I've used to for various pen and paper RPGs before. Granted,
it's not a web app, but it has a lot to like.