An engine (framework?) that makes it very easy to prototype a board game, then instantly play it with one's friends.
Wanted to play board games with friends during the quarantine period, but couldn't find any good alternatives. Looked at many of them: BoardGameArena, Tabletop Simulator, Tabletopia etc. but none of them really gave me what I wanted.
- Get rendering
- Get representation of game state to exist and be consistent throughout server and client Encapsulate game state and actions into a class What the netcode will need to do: take a game state, modify it by an action, check the validity of that action, return a game state If we have a game state and action class and we have gameState.apply(action) which returns True or False if the new gameState is valid/otherwise or just gameState Client sends a list of actions it wants the server to look at Server takes list of actions from clients and applies those. It keeps track of which actions it's already applied, and applies only the actions it hasn't already seen before and are valid. It modifies the game state to that point and sends back all the actions that are accepted
We need to build a server that can send and receive game states. This server needs to be authoritative (i.e. it should have some way of denying invalid game-states sent by the client, and reconcile two mutually incompatible client game states)
There needs to be a way to share a link with a friend (to enter the same lobby), or to create/join a public lobby.
We are now straightforwardly displaying all entities in all zones to all players without checking zone permissions. We need to display or not display entities depending on zones' permissions.
- Make sure that every single entity has a "glance" state png in the JSON.
First, we need to find a way to know what object is clicked. We have the position but this also means knowing the size of each PNG as it is drawn on the canvas. Maybe Shan can handle this.
Do a simple linear search over the game state (or possibly the "visible objects" game state, which I will prepare for Shan).
Second, we need to display the context-sensitive UI depending on the object.
The below is
Three different elements: zones, players, and entities.
An entity has a property and can be in a zone. An entity is a chess piece, a card, a die, a Scrabble tile, a piece of paper, etc.
A zone contains entities. A zone is a private hand, the game board, a bag, etc.
Players have permissions to see/move entities to and from zones. To move an entity from a zone is an action.
A game state 
is a list of 3-tuples 
, where State
is itself a dictionary of key-value pairs denoting the state of the entity.
Action set. There are three possible actions that any player can do:
- Add or remove an entity;
- moving an entity from one zone to another;
- changing the state of an entity.
An action is a function that takes a game state G and returns another:
For instance, moving an entity from one's hand to the board changes the game state from
and revealing a card by flipping it face-up would be
Finally, the history is a sequence of game states.