Board Game Arena

Hi,
I'm working on a two players abstract game with very simple rules (you can find them anywhere on the Internet).
If anyone can play one or two games it would be useful to me (UI, bugs…) !

http://fr.studio.boardgamearena.com/#!p ... n=prestige

I would also know if it is allowed to share a dev account to a stranger : I'd like to find one or two persons on the internet who know well this game in order to do some tests.

The game looks amazing >< Really great job!


Here are the small mistakes I found.

Log message in french : "doit choisir des pierres à capturer". On that note, better have every log lines in the present tense, rather than in the past. Or at least have them all in the same tense.
"black wins the game!" would benefit from a capitalized B (I'm being picky here ><)

Once, 3 stones were captured and the client of the "victim" crashed line 436 in declare.notif_stoneMoved. F5 fixed it. I most likely loaded a save and forgot to reload all pages! But I'm reporting it just in case...

There doesn't seem to be an automatic draw when the same moves are repeated enough times. When there are only 2 stones left on the board, if one of the player is a patient troll, won't the other get a timeout?

I saw no statistics at the end. It could be the studio not showing any; otherwise here is a reminder ^^

Player names are red and green, but it'd be better for them to be of the color of their stones, wouldn't it?
You could useto make the name of the white player readable.


Now for suggestions, if you're not fed up with the game already ^^

It would have been nice to always be the player at the bottom rather than black stones always at the bottom.

Another tiny suggestion, it'd be nice to be able to "unselect" a selected stone by clicking on it again. I may be the only person in the world it annoys, though ^^

When you capture stones, it goes really fast. Half a second of inattention and you'll miss the move of your opponent. Maybe is it just me, I'm a beginner!
One crazy solution would be to show what happened when you move your mouse over the capture log message.

There is no zombie player if someone leaves the player. It's not necessary in a 2 player game, but if you pre-calculated all possible moves, it could be fun to add a completely random zombie.


Once again, great adaptation! I'm sure admins will be very pleased about it.

Thank you for your review !

About the crash you encountered : I think I encountered it some times and it puzzles me. I didn't see any consistency to make it happen so I don't know how to fix it.
However, it seems (not sure yet) to happen when the synchronization of the HTML elements fails between the clients : the game asks the "failed" side to interact with an element which doesn't exists yet, so it throws an error message and you need to refresh the game.

Any idea how the HTML synchronization would fail between the two players (generally speaking) ?

In the "official" rules, if the players don't want to finish the game as you say, it's a draw. I plan to to add a turn counter to avoid that. For example, if a player has less than 3 stones remaining, the counter begins and the game automatically ends after 10 (arbitrary number) turns.

I didn't look at the stats part yet, but what kind of stats are you thinking about for this game ?

Player color names : you're talking about the player colors at any place on the page ? Notifications, score boards etc ? I should have a black shadow only on the white text to make it readable, it won't look good on a black text.
edit : I set a player color to white ; BGA seems to detect that's a light color and adds a grey background on it in the notification block, that's ugly (and there is no class on the element so it would be a pain to fix it) :


"black wins the game" : that's a mistake, it should be the player name.

Regarding the player position : not sure to understand : each player would see itself at the bottom of the board ? So the board would look different for each of the players ?

Unselect a stone : seems a nice addition.

Resume of the move on the log : yeah why not. I guess it will ask more work ; I could add it but not until the game is bug-free

Zombie player turn : it's on my todo list. I pre-calculate moves up to 1 turn only so the zombie will be able to capture stones, but not to deliberately make "chains".

A friend had some suggestions too : to highlight the selected stone on the opponent side, to have a letter-number coordinate system (C,3 instead of 3,3) displayed on the board in front of each column/line.

I don't know if I'll keep the green hints or not.
If I remove them, the player will always know that there are remaining moves during his turn because the turn won't end automatically (it ends automatically if the player can't capture any stone on the next turn), which works kind of like a hint by itself.
I could always show the "end turn" button at any turn, but the game flow will suffer from it because the player will have to click this button to end each oneof his turn…

I tried to join your active turn-based game and got the following error:

Erreur inattendue: Wrong formatted data from BGA gameserver 1 (method: createGame): Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ',' in /var/tournoi/release/games/fanorona/999999-9999/fanorona.game.php on line 412

Challenge me to a turn based game when you're ready and we'll check it's fixed.

It's fixed, I forgot to check my last modifications before leaving my computer for the afternoon.

Looks really really nice !

Possible bugs :
- I'm allowed to simply move a stone even when I have a valid capture, isn't that against the rules ?
- Beware that there are some error messages when clicking on the log to use the replay function, that may be a sign that something's wrong with your notifications.

A few suggestions :
- I'd recommend to make selectable only the stones which can actually be moved (at the very least, only those that belong to the player !)
- Once a stone is selected, you could show a preview of which stones will be captured when you hover over a possible destination (useful for people learning the game).
- And you could have a button to start over your turn if you're not pleased with how your chained captures are going (that would justify having to manually end each turn).

There are multiple version of the games, one of which allows to simply move a stone even when you could capture elsewhere. It's explained in the French Wikipedia page. The one that forces to capture is explained on the English Wikipedia page if I remember correctly.
But it doesn't seem like you're forced to capture as long as you can. I quite like the flow of the game from the absence of an end turn button, but it may be strategically interesting not to capture as much as you could.

The statistics are meant for players to improve. You can compare yours with a mean value from the best players on BGA.
Some "fun" statistics are welcome as well, like the most captured stones in one move.

i was talking about the colors of player names, yes.
And directions are not important in this game, so forget about my suggestion on always starting with owned stones at the bottom, sorry.

Hi,
Thanks again for the reviews.

Yeah, there are no really "official" rules and we can find many variants of them.
In my version, the first move can capture opponent stones or not.
If it leads to a capture, you can (it's not mandatory, you can end your turn instead) move the same stone again, but only if the move :

• leads to another capture
• doesn't use an intersection previously occupied by your stone in the same turn
• doesn't have the same direction as your previous move from the same turn

What do you mean by selectable : when clicked or when hovered ?
Actually you can select only stones of your own color.
I like the idea of be able to select only moveable stones.
I also like the idea of the captured stone previews.
Not sure about the cancel option thought. I could take a look at this but it's a bit complicated I guess (that's my first game), maybe I could add this later when the game will be finished.

About the hints regarding the available moves when clicking on a stone and maybe the hints of which stones would be captured, I could use them in a "beginner" difficulty mode.

The rules from the "standard" (experienced for say) mode would show no hints at all, except the turn would automatically when no more move can capture opponent stones.
Remains the issue where the end button would be always displayed and the fact that it disrupts the game flow, not sure about how to handle that.

pikiou : great idea about the stats, I'll take a look at this (at the very end ) !

Coin-coin le Canapin wrote:What do you mean by selectable : when clicked or when hovered ?
Actually you can select only stones of your own color.

When it's my turn I can click on any stone (even in the other color) and it appears bigger (at least it behaved this way yesterday).
What I mean is that it would be clearer if only movable stones responded to clicks.

That's weird, I just tried and it does not work this way on my computer. I can select a stone only if it's during my turn and if the stone is mine.
Can you start a new game ? Maybe it was because I was working on it yesterday.