Comment by btoconnor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btoconnor | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Myself and 2 friends built BreakBase with the goal of making the seemingly simple process of playing a board game on the Internet with friends as easy as it should be. Existing sites on the web are shockingly complex to find a way to play against people you already have means of contacting.

At the time of this writing, we’ve got 5 games: Checkers, Chess, Four-in-a-Row, Reversi and WordBase.

Features:

- Each ‘room’ has a unique url - share it via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google chat, or text message, it makes no difference to us. There’s no need to coordinate navigation to the same server, just to play a game. Just share the url.

- Play anonymously- you can play on our site without registering. If you want to, you can register to keep track of your records, get alerts when it’s your turn or something else interesting happens in your games.

- Real time updates. When your opponent makes a move / chats, you’ll see it right away without refreshing.

- Come back to your game later. If you register for an account, you can resume your game from a different device. Play from your phone, desktop, tablet, whatever. If you don't register, this doesn't work - we can't keep track of your games if we don't know who you are.

- No plugins required. BreakBase works on HTML5 / Javascript. No Flash / Java needed.

- WordBase supports up to 4 players.

- Get smart notifications via email or Twitter, and via the browser. Registered accounts only.

The stack:

- Main web app built on Pylons.

- Our Comet/push layer is built using Node.js, as the glue between ZeroMQ and Socket.io.

- We use MongoDB because it’s web scale.

The future: These are being actively worked on, and will be released in the near future:

- Planning more games. Currently considering Backgammon, War strategy games, or card games. Open (and eager) to suggestions

- Challenges. Challenge someone to a game directly from their profile.

- Mobile support. As of right now, you can make moves on Android / iOS devices by just going to breakbase.com in the browser, but we’d obviously like to provide a tailored experience for smaller screens.

What would it take to get you to use this on a regular basis?

Very nice project, I would really love Go, been dying to play friendly games once in a while with friends but IGS and the other online corners are so unfriendly

This looks very cool. I play a lot on http://iggamecenter.com, which has a zillion games, but is kinda clunky and does have the extra friction of requiring players to create an account first. What you've made is definitely better for the use-case of IMing someone a link to play.

However, if you add the ability to find other players on the site/play a random person, as has been suggested here, I think you may find that accounts being optional is a downside. Some people will make one move then leave, or just play very slowly and poorly. An account system where you can see stats on someone's past games helps avoid that un-fun situation.

The game I would most like to see you add is Hex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_%28board_game%29 Maybe Dots and Boxes would be nice too as a casual game that can be played quickly, but has a bit of depth.

Ha, Hex was top on my list for games to create. I was leaving it open for other people to suggest. Glad I've got some support :)

Yes, anonymous accounts poses many challenges to things like that. Chances are, if/when we implement random opponents, you'll have to be registered (and your opponent would have to be registered as well).

If you register for an account, you can resume your game from a different device... we can't keep track of your games if we don't know who you are.

Why couldn't I just email myself a URL in the same way I was invited to a particular game in the first place? It might have to be a different URL (if you wanted to use the same invite for multiple players).

Maybe accounts are better overall, I don't know, the above just made them sound more required than they seem to me to be.

I think I should have made this more clear.

We track anonymous accounts through the browser session. You can play many games all with the same account, and you'll have a dashboard where you can flip between games just like registered accounts. We don't track your record, though.

However, if you close your browser (eliminating your session), your account becomes a dead end.

You couldn't just use the same URL because it will be a new session, and thus create a new account, which won't be the same account as the existing one (and thus, won't be able to make moves as the original account).

So, you'll be able to play games, but we won't be able to keep track of your games over different devices (specifically, different sessions).

How about you provide a way to generate an additional URL which would be associated with your own anonymous account rather than with an individual game? When this other URL is opened in a different browser (perhaps on a different device) you could associate that new session to the same anonymous account.

This way, if I know I'm about to terminate my browser session, or if I just want to move to a different device, I could do so without making an account.

The only problem is how to present this in the interface without confusing users and generating unnecessary clutter. I would probably put it near account creation options as an alternative.

> The only problem is how to present this in the interface without confusing users and generating unnecessary clutter.

Since what you want is literally no different than creating an account (except perhaps the existence of a password), why not just make an account? Rather than remember or store an "anonymous user URL," just choose a username and remember or store that. Allowing username creation without requiring a password is a great idea for something like this.

IMO you should add an option to play a game with a random user. While I like playing every couple hours a la words with friends, it would be nice to be able to play with whomever is online right now...

and if you don't mind me asking, are you planning on monetizing it? there doesn't seem to be ads anywhere I've been

Ideally we'll build something to play random users. It just wasn't something we build out at first.

To answer about monetization, we have loose ideas. I'm really against pop up ads and awkward experiences that most sites tend to have around this. I've toyed with ideas such as premium accounts, or something like old Pandora that used to show one, integrated ad for the entire page.

Mostly though, we're waiting to see how people use the site. It's impossible to monetize something when you don't understand how people use it.

A chess website that I subscribe to is gameknot.com. The model that they use are some simple text and picture ads for free members. Optionally, you can pay about 40 a year for no ads and some additional features. They focus on chess exclusively and have some really nice features and a clean interface. Your real time updating sound like an improvement, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com