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Show HN: Board Games with Video Chat

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Tl;dr: Would like to hear thoughts on board games platform prototype (https://bordga.me/games/7)

We are building an online board games platform which lets you create & play any board game online while video chatting with your co-players. Game play resembles the real world where users have to do everything from moving the pieces to enforcing the rules.

We are quite early in our journey. We prototyped Chess to see if people would be interested in this direction.

Please try it here! (https://bordga.me/games/7)

You can enter your name that creates a new game session and you can invite others to join the session by sharing the URL.

We are aware of the existing solutions like Tabletopia, Boardgamearena, etc. But we think that human connection which we all enjoy while playing games is missing that’s been the centerpiece of our current direction.

We would like to hear from you about how you would like to use it vs why you wouldn’t use it.

This is nice! I tried it out on an iPhone.

On an iPhone, it is almost usable. The game setup modal form is difficult to navigate from the input fields to “Start” button. It required switching back and forth between vertical and horizontal orientation in order to have enough pixels to see the “Start” button. I think(?) if it had been a submit type button, then I would have been able to proceed even without seeing the button.

I tried “Snakes and Ladders.”

Once in the game, things were a touch cramped, but surprisingly usable! It wasn’t entirely clear how I was able to trigger a die roll, but I could. It was a little bit difficult to see the game board due to a shininess in the shader...if that effect could be scaled way back, it would improve legibility of the game board.

Hope that helps!

Thanks for trying it out sharing your feedback on mobile experience. We are still very early and this feedback helps.

Assuming we make the experience better, are there any particular use cases that come to your mind you see yourself using this for?

I love board games. I own Tabletop Simulator, but honestly have never used it; I think a big part of the reasons why are:

1) other people I want to play with don’t own it, maybe don’t even have Steam, and the barrier to entry is just too high.

2) being at a computer feels too much like work. I prefer mobile devices for “play” for this reason.

You are already basically solving both of those problems by being “web native” even if there’s a couple kinks to work out.

You might consider whether or not you would be able to be interoperable with whatever game-definition format Tabletop Simulator uses. It is a similar concept, and allows you to “bring your own” game assets/definitions and share them with others via Steam Workshop (although I think there’s also a mechanism to do this even if you aren’t using it on Steam). If you were interoperable with that format, you would instantly have a huge library of prebuilt board game assets and behaviors available to you. Even if you were only able to support importing the assets, that would open up a lot of possibilities for this concept.

That's a great point you make about the niche market. For serious board gamers, there are already good solutions. But non serious or family / happy hour type board gamers, barrier to entry to those platforms is high. There might be a need for those who fall into that bucket.

Agree that, if we can use / integrate with existing solutions like tabletop simulator, we could potentially focus on how to make them fun for not-so-serious users.

One concern there is about the classic debate - feature vs product. Intuitively it feels like a feature rather than product, but that's where we have to push and figure out.

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