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Show HN: Digital player board for Terraforming Mars
My cousin and I love the Terraforming Mars board game. But we'd often get overly excited and knock our pieces off of our boards, losing track of our progress. So I digitised it. It comes with a few cool features like resource conversions (e.g. converting plants to greenery), production phase, offline, mobile-friendly and keeps track of the history using the browser history itself. Sharing this here in case there are any other TM fans that could also find some use in this :)
- matusp 2y agoYou could add logs with timestamps. It is common that players forgot what actions they did, e.g. "Did I forgot to add a TR for this ocean?"
- sakerbos 2y agoYes this is a problem and a great idea thanks! Adding to my TODO list :)
- neals 2y agoLove this game! Anybody know of / have experience with any expansions?
- mirashii 2y agoBefore going to expansions, I’d strongly suggest playing Ares Expedition, the card game. It keeps 90% of the feel of the board game but speeds the game up substantially and gives a lot more opportunity to make it through the deck.
- thomascountz 2y agoThanks for making this! Have you considered open sourcing this?
- sakerbos 2y agoPleasure! Yes it is open source: https://github.com/shaunsaker/tm-player-board https://github.com/shaunsaker/tm-player-board. I'll add a link to the home page too :)
- can16358p 2y agoI can't figure out how to play. I'm on a screen where there are - + buttons for various properties with a "Production Phase" button. Whatever I do, nothing happens when I tap that button.
- eigenket 2y agoIt looks like you have to hold down the production phase button for a bit
- acomjean 2y agoI don’t think this is a standalone version. It’s a helper tool to replace all the pieces of the board game.
- pimlottc 2y agoIt's not obvious, but you have to hold down the button, even after the "progress bar" fills up.
- chromatin 2y agoBeware: takes over the browser history rather than refreshing in-place
- sakerbos 2y agoYip! Should just be for the current tab though so that we can forward/back through our score history. If that's not the case, please let me know :)
- Vilkku 2y agoYes, but it still produces a bunch of entries in the actual browser history
- sakerbos 2y agoAh right, my bad, that's super annoying. I'll remove that functionality for now.
- throwaway89201 2y agoPlease take user feedback with a grain of salt. Being able to navigate through board versions is a very useful feature. An alternative for the browser history API is not immediately obvious. Many other web apps work in this way.
- sakerbos 2y agoYeah fair enough. I actually found the massive navigation history annoying too, I'd just forgotten about it until now. I think I have a solution to replace the navigation history with local state so we should still be able to navigate between board versions, will see. Appreciate the feedback :)
- neuah 2y agoNeat idea! However one issue with everyone using a digital tracker is that you can't then easily see what other player resource stockpiles and production levels are. Perhaps at the very top of the screen you could have a compact summary view that people can leave their screen at when not making adjustments, allowing other players to see the stats at a glance.
- fifilura 2y agoThat is actually a good pet project. Find the most suitable hardware for a boardgame setting. Screen technology/form factor. Maybe there is even a market for hybrid kind of games? (Right, I guess monopoly with the calculator flopped. But never give up!)
- sakerbos 2y agoI'd be very interested in exploring this idea! Do you know of any board games that it could work for? This also just gave me an idea to justify my board game budget to my wife as a R&D business expense so thank you ;)
- sakerbos 2y agoThank you! Yes this had actually become a problem for us but it weirdly ended up adding an interesting new dynamic to the game. So much so that we'd actively try and hide our resources from each other and had to try to keep track of each other's resources in our heads (the irony in adding a digital calculator only to increase cognitive load is very real). But yeah, I can imagine not everyone would want to play like this and a compact summary could solve that issue. I shall see what I can do :)
- collinmcnulty 2y agoMobile version seems to have odd scrolling behavior where I reach the bottom of the “page” too early. Cool idea
- sakerbos 2y agoAre you on Android by any chance? if so, I think that would be Android's weird browser bar hiding behaviour when you get to the bottom of the page, or just something weird I overlooked. Could probs add some padding to avoid that which I shall do, thanks!
- stevage 2y ago"android's weird browser behaviour?" Android is the dominant platform. Whatever it does isn't weird, it's standard. Also, do you mean Chrome? There are other browsers.
- sakerbos 2y agoYeah I've always found the browser bar hiding when you scroll to the bottom of a page a bit weird. But yeah you're right, it looks like a Chrome-only thing my bad.
- sbarre 2y agoI would consider including some context on the homepage that this supports a board game and isn't a standalone game.. Great work too!
- sakerbos 2y agoGood idea thanks!
- PeterisP 2y agoKnocking the trackers off is a real issue, however, a great non-digital solution to that is the wooden laser-cut boards with physical notches for the cube slots - e.g. https://github.com/cophus/terraforming-mars-board https://github.com/cophus/terraforming-mars-board and the many other options if you google or search etsy.
- failrate 2y agoI tried to convince the publisher to add cutouts for pieces when they went to reprint an even more deluxe version, but they were unconvinced.
- timvdalen 2y agoThe Ares Expedition version of the game does have double-layered player boards, works really well! (I'm not sure how different the player board is to the main game, maybe you could use that?)
- ycombinete 2y agoProbably because they sell them as luxury addons. https://fryxgames.se/product/tm-dual-layer-player-boards-5-pcs/ https://fryxgames.se/product/tm-dual-layer-player-boards-5-p...
- erikerikson 2y agoMy cat sees your notches and raises a paw.
- RangerScience 2y agoNeat! Also, I'mma just gonna leave this here... https://terraforming-mars.herokuapp.com/ https://terraforming-mars.herokuapp.com/ (no, not something I've made)
- sakerbos 2y agoThanks! Looks like they've recreated the entire game, it even has decent docs. Will defs give it a go!
- aloisdg 2y agoI contributed a bit to this projet. Fun maintainer. I stopped when I learned that Terraforming Mars author's was transphobic and racist. If you like TM, try Wingspan and Ark Nova!
- RangerScience 2y agoI also recommend Wyrmspan (wingspan “sequel”, this time with dragons).
- themoonisachees 2y agoVery nice! This could easily be adapted to the Ares Expedition expansion/other game thing: Remove production of titanium and steel, remove energy entirely. Players start at 5 TL and 0 production everywhere. They can also produce cards, maybe add a pop-up like "draw x cards now!" Whenever production happens?
- sakerbos 2y agoThanks! Yeah totally, it should be fairly easy to do. Could select the game variant after selecting a new game. I'll see what I can do :)
- szundi 2y agoHow much does it cost to be hot on HN?
- sakerbos 2y agoApparently just a side project that was used by only two people in the world :)
- hhshhhhjjjd 2y agoIf you press a plus button four times, then you have to press back four times to leave the site.
- fsiefken 2y agoNice, there's also a Vassal Terraforming Mars module. Vassal provides a client-server shared board game state for lots of boardgame modules you can also make yourself. It's java based. https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Terraforming_Mars https://vassalengine.org/wiki/Module:Terraforming_Mars
- Vilkku 2y agoBottom of the page is hidden behind the production phase on Firefox on Android: https://ibb.co/6PYz5WB https://ibb.co/6PYz5WB
- sakerbos 2y agoThanks for this, I'll fix it asap :)
- fsnowdin 2y agoI thought this was like that one Twilight Struggle companion digital board that was pretty much the physical board but digital (which allows you to play with just the cards) since this covers just the resources mat. Still neato though.
- Narishma 2y agoIt's not that mobile-friendly with the battery-draining background animation.
- sakerbos 2y agoOoh fair enough. I'll add an option to disable that, thanks!
- bayangan 2y agoVery nice! Might consider this for our next game. Would you consider adding a +-10 button to the megacredits (and maybe heat)? It would be a good timesaver for large purchases