Board Game Arena

For the first game of 2013, we are very proud to present Quarto, a game from Blaise Müller that you have been able to discover on BGA since the middle of this week.

Quarto is an abstract strategy game with a deceptively simple, and really powerful concept. In order to win, you have to form a line of 4 pieces presenting one common property among 8 available, each piece getting 4 properties out of these 8. And the trick is, that you are the one to choose the piece that your opponent is gonna play! So at some point, you could literally find yourself handing him out the victory... So, watch your step!

In twenty years, Quarto received a lot of awards and has become one of the most acclaimed abstract games. At the end of 2012, the publisher announced that there had been more than a million boards sold in the world. Quite a success, and well deserved! It was also the first game published by Gigamic at the beginning of the nineties, and it has been a flagship game of theirs ever since. A big thank you to them for allowing us to host this online version!

But in fact, that's not everything! We are also very proud of this release because Quarto is the first game that has been implemented by a developer of the BGA community on our BGA Studio platform.

So in order to mark with a white stone the first of what we hope will be many such events, and to give you an close up view of the process, we did a quick interview with Joe (joeeoj on BGA):

BGA: Hi Joe, can you tell us something about you, and give us the names of one or two of your favourite games?
Joe: That is a question that comes up pretty often, but is really hard to answer, as it changes constantly. One of my all-time favorite games is Through the Ages.

BGA: Great game indeed! So you were one of the fearless code warriors to try out BGA Studio while it was fresh out of the oven! How did it go?
Joe: Well, developing even a simple game becomes complicated when you need to break up the code into many layers for a multi-player real-time web application. You'll need to keep your PHP and Javascript syntax straight, and understand what needs to go into the database, and how the server side interacts with the client side. Fortunately web apps are what I do for a living so it wasn't too terrible. BGA has built a really excellent framework that takes care of a huge part of the work required to synchronize the players so developers can focus on just making the game.

BGA: You also discovered the Quarto game in the process. Does coding a game help to understand everything about it? Did you become the greatest living Quarto player?
Joe: It's kind of funny because I had never played Quarto until I was pretty much finished developing it. I am pretty terrible at the game actually The strategy is very interesting, I think you need to look a few turns ahead to set up a win, but it's a real brain burner.

BGA: So now that you hold the title of 'most seasoned Studio developer', do you have any old timer advice for new developers willing to join now or in the future?
Joe: PHP and Javascript are pretty easy to learn if you know some other languages. The multi-tiered web programming principles are a bit trickier. The Reversi tutorial was extremely useful as sort of a template. The game phase state machine makes limiting which players can do what actions on their turns (or on other players turns) much easier to handle. I'd definitely recommend starting with a very simple game to get the hang of it.

BGA: Thanks a lot! We hope that you had fun in the process and will try out developing some other game... Oh, wait, in fact we already know you will!

is there a chance that BGA will increase the number of the game they release each month? since new studio developer are asked to develop an abstract game for their first one and since there is only one new game each month,i'm really worried we might start to see a lot of abstract games in spite of other non-abstract game

Yes, that should be an effect of the Studio, as there is more developers

As new developers need to start with games simple to implement to get how things work, there will probably be a lot of abstracts at first - abstract game lovers, rejoice ! But after that, you can expect the developers to tackle games more complex to implement.

And in the meantime, as usual, the BGA team will do his best to release games of different types so that eveyone can discover new games he loves!

I like the game, the only downside is that it is usually easier to create "ties".

@Oso: you can try the 'advanced' variant, I think there is a lot less ties when 2x2 (square of pieces) count as victory