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Comment by prakhar897 | Hacker News Reader

thinly related but i could really use some advice.

There's a board game called "quoridor" that I've been playing a lot lately. I found 2 platforms where u can play this online, major one being BGA (boardgamearena). It was kinda sad to see a game on par with chess in terms of simplicity and strategy, being lumped into the same group as kids games.

So, I started building a platform for it myself in my free time. Still a work in progress (https://li-quoridor.vercel.app/).

The issue is that I have no clue if the game mechanics are copyrighted or not. The wiki says "By 1997, the five biggest game companies in the world (including Gigamic) American bought the copyright [clarify] of this game and released it to the world". But wiki itself acknowleges that this is a statement has no source. So, how do i go about making sure i have the right permissions to build this stuff, and will they even give these permission or not?

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With the disclaimer that I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice:

- Game mechanics generally can't be copyrighted. If you had a platform for playing "Prakhar's Game" that had the exact same rules as Quoridor, you'd be in the clear.

- Specific pieces of art related to the game would definitely be copyrighted. Copying the exact box art of some commercially-released version of Quoridor would be an issue.

- I think the issue to be concerned about would be whether you can use the name (which would be trademarked, not copyrighted). A quick search turned up a page from the US Patent and Trademark Office [1] showing that it's still held by Gigamic. I'd probably look for sources on that 1997 "release to the world" to see if you can find more details; looking around Gigamic's site might also turn up something.

EDIT: BGA definitely isn't just for kid's games, incidentally. Something like Ark Nova or Agricola is a long ways from Battleship or Candy Land or what not.

[1] https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75334527&caseSearchType=U...

BGA is... not for kids games. I mean, there are kids games there, but there's also RftG, TtA, T&E...

Quoridor is nice but I would not even put it in the top 10 modern abstracts, let alone on par with chess.

Legality aside, it is a bit of a dick move to reimplement a modern abstract that people can play for free, or even make themselves for a low cost, just because you don't like the (free) site it's on.

The problem isn't free site, it's extensibility. Chess/chess.com has 100s of variants, ability to study games, and lots of other chess specific features.

Bga has fixed set of features for all its games. And their focus is divided.

This game atleast deserves its own home.

Look, for all I know Gigamic is just waiting for someone to come along and make chess.com for Quoridor, and you're the guy to do it.

But I think your ignorance of the hobbyist game market is revealed a bit here already (not having full context for BGA, not knowing if Gigamic still owns it - they certainly do and had a booth at Essen this year like they do every year) - and you're vastly overestimating not just Quoridor's popularity but the size of the entire market for non-chess/go/tables/poker games. And I don't just mean financially - dozens of variants are no good if there are barely enough players to match dozens of games to begin with.

Did you try contacting BGA to see if you could get the Studio files for Quoridor?

Expanding on one point - not just market size, but the amount of competition. As you said upthread, there's no shortage of reasonably popular [1] modern abstract games, there's plenty of other options for people to play. It might be possible to try and promote Quoridor more broadly, given how simple its rules are, but that'd be tough (and marketing it more yourself, beyond just providing an implementation, would probably cause issues with Gigamic).

[1] Popular within the modern board game community, at least.

Not even “competition”. BGA is more or less allowed because it’s assumed it drives sales. A Quoridor-only site would probably sell Quoridor fine, but BGA will also sell Cuarto, or a dozen other Gigamic games. Or vice versa - BGA probably does more to draw e.g. Catan players into checking out Quoridor than a dedicated Quoridor site would.

Also BGA explicitly asks for permission to post these games.

Also BGA is pretty big and large. It's already one of the best places to put digital implementations of games, and that's why you see major hobby games come out on there, like Wingspan and Ark Nova, with about 75 or more new games added to the site every year, including games that haven't even been released yet and still on Kickstarter, like Undergrove recently.

And yeah, I've bought probably at least a dozen games now after playing them on BGA first. It's fun to play them on BGA, but I'd also like to play them in person with my friends, too.

It's categorized as a "Children's Game" on Board Game Geek [1]. BGA is probably just using the same categories.

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/624/quoridor

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