Turn Based Forum Game Trial?

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I was clearing out a NVMe for space (thanks DCS map makers etc) and found a 60% finished project I did a while ago. I hate not finishing things, even if just for fun, so I’m going to try to resurrect this one today and wanted to see if any interest.

It’s an online board game built as a plugin for a discourse forum, e.g. like this one. It’s turn based and is super basic but is probably at the stage where I should fling it out for people here to try and then fix it and make it better.

It’s all open source code, nothing super complicated and people are also welcome to add code to it if they want as well. Legally it is nothing to do with a game called Risk™ as it uses a fantasy map and some abridged rules. I’m not really a good board game player so part of this is to fix what I did.

Here’s how it looks just now, and you’ll get the idea from that I think:

War Room view

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Topic View

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So stuff that would happens is that we get two player guinea pigs :pig_face: to step up and try it out and I’ll see what needs to be fixed. It is a 4 to 6 player game, but we can start with the mini map to see if any of it works first.

Here’s the basic how to play:
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MVP flow*

  1. Staff creates a game attached to an existing topic. (I’ll do that if we get two victims willing to try this out)
  2. Players join, or staff adds players with POST /not-risk/games/:id/join. (I’ll do this bit as well as no UI)
  3. Staff starts the game with POST /not-risk/games/:id/start. (yep, me again)
  4. Current player deploys reinforcements based on territories held: max(3, owned territories / 2 + territory bonuses).
  5. Current player may attack adjacent enemy territories repeatedly.
  6. Current player advances to fortify, then may fortify once between adjacent owned territories.
  7. Current player ends the turn.
  8. The plugin creates one topic reply summarizing the completed turn.

Territory bonuses are currently: Central Kingdom +2, Southern Bay +1, and Isle of Mists +1. At game start, one additional non-bonus territory is randomly promoted to +1 for that game. Starting ownership is randomized, but the three fixed bonus territories are dealt across players first so one player cannot start with all three.

So the user interface is really raw and you’ll need to click around as a player to figure it out, at this stage I’m just trying to see if turns work at all etc.

Anyone want to try?

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Mudspike Turn Based Experiment - Game 1
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I created a stub topic here - those topics anyone can see and post in, so like chat about the game etc. The full ‘battle log’ is in the ‘war room’ (no fighting in the war room etc) and a summary is put back in the main topic.

Test Game Uno!

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Changelog

  • Added a tagging notification (e.g. the @ thing) of the next up user in the summary topic post, so that they know it is their turn next.
  • Considering tweaking bonus territories (maybe remove one to make it an odd number) but not sure as yet? Hmm?

Next Up, Maybe

  • Some sort of admin UI to create a new game, a players ‘join’ button so I don’t have to manually bootstrap a topic. Only when a game can be finished and works I guess.
  • Nicer ‘armies’ picker, e.g. highlight some icons or something rather than that plain ‘[ 1 ]’ input box.
  • An instructions dialog and nicer hints text, so you know to click on map and do stuff.
  • Some sort of ‘I didn’t click on a territory so unselect’ toggle.
  • Perhaps some sort of step results dialog from the turn, but don’t want too many jumping dialogs coming up. At the moment doing an attack feels a bit anti-climatic just seeing the results on the map and scrolling down the battle log.
  • Humanize the battle log, and squirrel the debug stuff like it is now in a hidden section.
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If anyone else wants a two player game (so we can test the 2 games running together, should be fine (cough) then do holla and speak up. @wheelsup_cavu and @jenrick - can you two roll dice ok? :slight_smile:

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About to call it a night, have to be up early tomorrow. But I should be good tomorrow night probably.

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