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.