FRfreetonik·Dec 18, 2024Submission
Boardgame.io: an engine for creating turn-based games using JavaScript
345 points · Open discussionboardgameio
boardgame.io
TypeScript2017–2024
boardgameio / boardgame.io
boardgame.io
State Management and Multiplayer Networking for Turn-Based Games
6Distinct people
7Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
12.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
State Management and Multiplayer Networking for Turn-Based Games
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
Vassal has two main limitations: - It requires a download (not web-based). - Most games still require you to manage the board state yourself. Like someone else pointed out,…
nicolodavis used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-11-29 21:41:25 UTC to 2024-12-18 10:50:20 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesIf you're already using react/redux, there's one really nice pattern to make eventsourcing easy to implement. I learned it from the boardgame.io google project[1].
Basically redux is more or less already doing eventsourcing on the client. You have actions("events") that tells your global state what the next state should be, and replaying the history of all actions will deterministically get you to your current state. The only thing you need to do is persist that history of actions in your state also (which is already commonly done for implementing undo and time-travel).
Then all that is left is to make your server use these same events too! This means whenever you save to the server, rather than doing GraphQL/REST-style per resource updates, you just sync any unsaved redux actions from the client. The server will save these actions and op
Read the rest
tionally replay them to get a snapshot of current state (or don't - that's just an optimization. The queue of actions is the first class citizen now).
Afterwards realtime collaboration, undo/time-traveling, history/audit logging, etc all come for free.
This is a really nice way to unify event shape design that is consistent on client and server.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15946425 or https://github.com/google/boardgame.io.
(I am making it sound a little simpler than it is. There's a lot of details to get right with state design, tagging actions as relevant to be persisted, multiplayer conflict resolution, app versioning issues, event queue compaction, serverside permissions validation, etc. But to get a prototype up and running quickly what I said above will work. Boardgame.io didn't worry about those details but it's still a nice codebase to study)
Saw this previously on hn https://github.com/google/boardgame.io/blob/master/README.md
In Phaser 3.0: HTML5 game frameworkYeah, I filed https://github.com/google/boardgame.io/issues/9. The source in github does check if the cell is filled [1] but the demo code must be from an earlier version that didn't.
[1] https://github.com/google/boardgame.io/blob/master/examples/...
In Boardgame.io: State management and more for turn-based gamesBoard game framework for React (unofficial Google project)
1 points · Open discussionFeel free to get in on the conversation at https://github.com/google/boardgame.io/issues/7 :)
In Vassal – Online Adaptations of Board GamesVassal has two main limitations:
- It requires a download (not web-based).
- Most games still require you to manage the board state yourself.
Like someone else pointed out, boardgamearea.com, yucata.de and (my favorite) http://play.boardgamecore.net/ also manage the game state for you.
I've been working on a (very early stages still) rules engine that will hopefully make it easier for more websites like the above to pop up in the future: https://github.com/google/boardgame.io
In Vassal – Online Adaptations of Board Games