Board Gaming in Figma | Hacker News Reader

Board Gaming in Figma

mastery.games

72 pointsBerislavLopac25 comments

I was curious about boardgamearena.com the other day. They had hundreds of board games implemented on their platform, and I figured they probably had some sort of DSL for board games rules and was wondering about what that might look like. I went looking around and found out that, surprise, the site was open source! So I went looking.

It's just...PHP. Each game is written from scratch in PHP with SQL tables for game state (custom schemas for each game), with clients written mostly from scratch in JavaScript and Dojo.

For a bit, I thought "this is crazy," then I realized that they have successfully implemented hundreds of board games and I have not, so perhaps I should trust they know what they're doing.

Many of the games are implemented by volunteers!

With an open source project like that it's probably best to supply an empty canvas or maybe a standardized tool kit and then let the community take over. An over engineer game engine will probably detour more casual contributors.

And another perspective is that 90% of open source contributors don't just want their name on a project, they want to experience a piece of tech they are new to.

I'll need to look in to "The Duke" it looks interesting - not sure on the figma implementation

regarding board games simliarish to chess - I can highly recommend Martian Chess, very easy to pick up, but if you play chess it messes with your head (in a good way)

rules: https://www.looneylabs.com/rules/martian-chess

I couldn't find any online version (except SWF versions)

What I really want is to play these games on my phone, and get a notification when it's my turn. Kind of like words with friends, but with board games and games like advanced wars/fire emblem/civilization. Almost everything on Android is complete anti-user garbage or requires everyone playing to commit the same hour to waiting around on each other's turns.

Cool but why didn't you just use the Tabletop Simulator version https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=36895...

"Because they can?" What other reason would someone need? Every post on here could be done a different way.

Well, this writeup is both novel and educational, so I'm glad they chose to do it this way regardless. However, to offer one possible answer to your question, there is a world of difference in UX (both good and bad) between Tabletop Simulator and more common, straightforward digital board games.

Tabletop Simulator requires a fairly decent 3D card. It’s pretty slow on an early 2020 MacBook Air, for example.

Figma is pretty slow on my 2019 MacBook Pro.

Also, tabletop is 20€ and as far as I know you can implement this with the free account on Figma.

Honestly, I've never really understood the appeal of Tabletop Simulator for 2-D games. Seems like a lot of overhead (computationally and conceptually) for something that would be more clearly and simply recreated in a 2-D world.

I've stuck to boardgamearena for my online playing.

It can be nice I guess when you've internalized the camera to the point you don't have to think about it. But it's so overkill. All I really want is a fast lightweight client that runs on anything.

Is there a 2D tabletop simulator? Friends and I have used it a ton as a fallback for games which don't have a digital copy; you can just scan your physical copy and have it running in TTS in an afternoon. I'm not sure there's a good alternative?

(also for true tabletop games like 40k or sigmar the 3d geometry is actually important and fun)

I haven't used it myself but I know Vassal [0] was used for Pipeline playstesting and it seems to have an extensive set of games set up already.

I like BoardGameArena since the games are licensed and you know you're supporting the creators in some way versus platforms that are typically unlicensed like TTS.

[0] https://vassalengine.org/about.html

The big advantage of TTS is that you can manipulate any components however you want, as in physical play. You can apply house rules, add custom components (cards/factions/etc), allow take-backs or corrections, play out experimental what-if scenarios, and so on.

If you don't care about that amount of freeform object manipulation and just want to bang through a game by its standard implementation, then yeah boardgamearena will do fine.

Tabletop Simulator doesn't require coding (although it has support for it). Especially last year during the worst of the pandemic, most game designers who put in the effort were still able to host online playtest nights, attend online game designer conventions (with the help of Discord) and show their games to publishers by making a TTS version of their game.

I've looked into making my games on BGA, and their system looked like a PHP mess I didn't want to deal with. If I'm going to be coding anyway I'd rather use a Typescript game engine like Phaser, Swift and SpriteKit, or C# and Monogame, and have full control over it.

Here's one of mine I uploaded to the Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=22173...

I was excited for it but it sets both of my computers on fire and glitches out a ton.

There has to be a "Figma" joke there....

There's not. It's just a figma of your imagination.

Okay, well figma one out and get back to us

I don't have any "Figma" jokes, but I do have a "Ligma" in the chamber :) Also comes in "Sackoma" and a "Suggandeze" variants.

I've noticed that this approach has its pros, but there's one con I need you to take care of. Con: Figma

Con figma dev environment for me please.

nope

I guess I'm getting old since I don't find this that exciting.

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