Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

Hi Josh,

I'm receiving an error upon accessing the page.

Object.hasOwn is not a function. (In 'Object.hasOwn(t,n)', 'Object.hasOwn' is undefined)

Using this thread as bug report.

There is a typo on the “Credits” card on game pages: ”arist” -> ”artist”

As an 10 year Mozilla veteran, I agree you should switch domains/project names. Mozilla was able to negotiate a deal for a number of reasons- Mitchell herself is a lawyer, the project is a NPO, and probably other reasons too, but it's not worth the effort to defend a slightly infringing name against the copyright holder in this case.

Wonder how the people of Zillah Washington feel about it

When you consider the most recent Godzilla film, Minus One, is the 37th in that franchise, and was not only nominated for an Oscar, and may be it's most lucrative, you can see why Toho would aggressively police that copyright.

Minus One is legit a great film.

It's pretty clear that "zilla" is a genericised word suffix, cf "bridezilla", in English.

Whilst it seems to originate with Godzilla -- which honestly also doesn't seem to associate with a particular company but instead I would say it's a now traditional monster name in stories, like Dracula -- noone is confusing this with any Godzilla franchise. These sort of attempts to own a word sten, across trademark categories, are an over-step that legislators need to rein in IMO.

Does the recent Sky trademark battle speak to this?

This comment is entirely my opinion and does not relate to my employer.

That seems a lot more dubious than the *zilla trademark.

Seems pretty trivial to support Python serverside. Python is very easy to run in a lightweight isolated container (and you can compile it to static executable). The game data that the engine makes available to the server side code looks pretty standard and doesn't look like a huge shim to maintain.

You could even cross compile the Python to typescript for a simplified server side environment (typy for example).

I clearly didn't "expect" the developer to port or do anything, I requested they consider also integrating with a (server-side) language that's in general more widespread, more expressive, more userbase, more libraries, more powerful developer tools. Per the examples I cited, boardgame platforms put most of the game logic on server-side, for complex games. The client-side checks that moves are not illegal, cheating or nonsensical.

I wasn't aware Lua had become widespread in game programming [0] (or more specifically, scripting on top of a game engine written in some other language); but supposedly not mainly due to whether Lua language has adequate features, but in part as a reaction to (client) performance of the Lua VM vs Python (VM maps to register set rather than stack-based; lower memory usage; coroutines); on client rather than on server. Some discussion in [0].

I did in fact in 2020 look into implementing a friend's boardgame in Lua on TTS vs in Python. That programming only confirmed my experience that line-for-line, Python is more expressive, IME more productive to develop in, also has much stronger library support.

Why is the basic documentation [1] on whether/how to implement OO Lua so contradictory and all over the place? When I look for a how-to document, I want a clear how-to, I don't want to see Lua's own users in a decades-long debate [2][3][4][5][6]. Or [7]. Or a lua-users.org/wiki that isn't even accessible via https [8]. (If I should be using a more accurate term than "OO", then just tell me what that is, instead of ad-hominems.) So for example, do we need polymorphism, mixins, the ability to call super, serialization (probably can do without that), etc. Should we sacrifice other features for more deterministic GC and performance? What are the compelling reasons for server-side Lua? on a feature-by-feature basis vs say Python?

(There's also a constituency who insist that Tcl is object-oriented, FWIW.)

Probably the best way to keep this discussion on-focus is to define "What is the consensus on an adequate set of OO features that's considered necessary for server-side game logic programming?" (that's a rational discussion, not "can't be bothered to", which is just ad-hominem).

As to TS, in my experience I don't find strong type-checking to prevent that many bugs, in codebases written by a small number of developers. I can program JS, so again if I saw a compelling reason to start using TS I would. (Sure, you could also crosscompile Python.) Again, that's not the primary issue, the primary issue is what server-side language once the game becomes complex and outgrows a pure TS implementation.

[0]: "Civilization V ditching Python for Lua" https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bp5m8/civiliza...

[1]: https://www.lua.org/pil/16.html

[2]: How can one implement OO in Lua? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4799078/how-can-one-impl...

[3]: Is doing OOP in Lua considered bad practice? https://www.reddit.com/r/lua/comments/tbaxlo/is_doing_oop_in...

[4]: Really, how best to give Lua an object/class structure? https://www.reddit.com/r/lua/comments/tia21g/really_how_best...

[5]: Is Lua an object-oriented language? (SO, 2011) https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3477676/is-lua-an-object...

[6]: Why inheritance isn't as useful in dynamic languages, and other notes on OO in Lua (marc.info) "In short: inheritance is in most cases not a feature, just a simplistic method for expressing similarity." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98529

[7]: r/ProgrammingLanguages, 2022: "If Lua is faster and smaller than Python, while being just as powerful and capable, then why is Python so much more popular?" https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/tfurk...

[8]: https://wiki.c2.com/?LuaUsersWiki

I remember a book on the shelf at home in the 90's entitled "Object Oriented Programming in Macro Assembler".

And indeed, C has function pointers, so you can do OO. Just not some of the more fun stuff.

> > Can you please please please integrate with Python on the server?

You expect the developer to port and maintain their entire project to Python because you can't be bothered to learn a new programming language?

They are literally begging, 3 "pleases", rather than "expecting".

Asmodee owns BGA, also owns a huge amount of game publishers. I have a decent collection and then looked at my games and noticed that Asmodee published like 70% of my games.

Just feels like we're reaching a point where if you want to get a game published at a larger scale and distributed, you'll likely really be incentivised to go through Asmodee.

Asmodee is hedgefund-owned French board game company. Drive by the injected money they have been 'consolidating' the board game publishing industry. For instance they bought the rights for Settler of Catan.

A lot of people fear that they will raise prices or reduce the offering to return money to the investors at some point.

The React aspects are really minimal, all the animation logic is by outside of React. We're really just using it for the jsx syntax to make it easier to return markup-looking components.

See reply above.

Fwiw, we're only using Discord for disposable communication. We have a docusaurus site up for the docs, and otherwise all the development is taking place on Github. Discord seems very popular with the board game crowd, so it was kind of the first place we went to try to reach gamers before we started reaching out to developers.

What do you prefer to discord for disposable communication? Certainly open to suggestions.

I have the same issues with Discord - but surely there must be bots that publish Discord support channels as indexable websites?

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/CommonsClause has several links explaining what's wrong with the Commons Clause. The reason the AGPLv3 is my preferred replacement is that the FAANGs are irrationally afraid of it and refuse to let it be used anywhere in the company (e.g., https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...), but it's still 100% Free Software and Open Source and so allowed to be packaged in Linux distributions that disallow proprietary software.

Wonderful, Working perfectly. Thank you.

Mechanics can't be copyrighted, but the board gaming community can smell rip offs from afar and don't particularly appreciates them.

Besides, it's going to be madness to advertise that you have the game X on your platform but can't use the name or any artwork.

If I were the OP, i'd try to gear this towards publishers and make it as easy as possible to create functional prototypes. They need to iterate countless times on prototypes, one little change at a time, and this could be a huge time saver for them, facilitate playtasting, etc...

Yep, seems resolved. Excellent.

You might be interested in the Phase abstraction of my engine.

Basically you represent your board game as a tree of phases through which your game progresses in.

Each node of your phase tree can contain state. At any point, your game is at leaf of your tree, and the state of the game is composed of all the states of all the nodes from the current leaf-phase to the root of the tree. Each leaf node also have a set of possible inputs describing what possible action players can take to progress into the game. This makes it really easy to handle games that have special "rare" phase that can break the flow of the game (for 7 Wonders: Duel, for example, phases where players must resolve a wonder's effect that asks them to destroy an opponent's card).

Ah, I guess I need to look at the docs more closely.