Topic: ZunTzu: online boardgames

[idolminds]

Site

There are a couple programs you can use to play boardgames online. Vassal has a lot of support, especially for wargames and card games. Especially useful for shuffling cards and such. Haven't figured that out in ZunTzu yet, but they do have a poker game available for it so maybe its in there.

Anyway, ZunTzu is nice because making new games for it is really pretty easy. A few image files, a couple of easy to edit XML files, and you're done. It supports multiplayer online, and apparently has voice chat and stuff built in. Plus it supports really cool 3D dice rolls and you can even use textures on the dice for those specialty games.

As a test I converted a free print-and-play game called Sea Rats! mostly because the rules are simple and it has a minimum number of tokens to create. Here is a screenshot of the main board. I rolled the dice just so you could see them, but they shrink and move back to the upper left after they roll. You can see that in this screenshot of the Captain's Logs, which are used to keep track of your ships supply of rum and canon balls. The upside down numbers are there so other players can see what you have when playing on a real table, so I stuck all the logs on one screen so you can instantly see what everyone has.

So that was fun to make. They have a bunch of game conversions already available like Zombies!!!, Carcassonne, and Lost Patrol (though some of them give errors when loaded. I might look into fixing them myself.) and the forums still seem to have some activity despite the program or site itself not getting an update in the last almost year. The author has made some more recent posts so perhaps its still being worked on.

[Quemaqua]

It does look like a cool program, and doesn't feel nearly so homebrewy as Vassal.  Has a nice solid feel to it by comparison.  We should definitely check it out and try to play some games at some point.

[idolminds]

Just an update.

I did find out about the programs ability to handle cards. Its got decks and you can shuffle them and stuff. You can even pull a random card out from the middle of a deck if you wanted.

So I worked on Dungeoneer today. After a couple false starts I figured out the optimal way to handle this many cards, with the proper art on the backs. Just have to come up with some counters/tokens for player movements and such, but it looks like it'll be good to go soon.

Update: For Dungeoneer I'm going to set it up so every player can have their own "play mat" in a tab so you can easily keep track of your health, pack, treasures, etc. so it doesn't clog up the main table. As the board grows I dont want people to have to move their stuff since I don't see an easy way to mass select and move things. I found a couple premade mats on BGG but I dont like how they look, so I'll whip one up tomorrow and drop it in.

Reading more on the program, I find out that you don't have your own view of the board. Everyone shares the same view, even switching tables and such. On one hand I can see that being a little annoying, but on the other you can see exactly what everyone is doing. Just have to remember to not "take over" when its not your turn.

[idolminds]

Dungeoneer has been coming along. I spent a few hours today trying to come up with that play mat I mentioned. I got a fairly nice one made up. Its not perfect, but its good enough.

Screens of progress!
Main Table
This is the main table. I kept trying to come up with a better background, but this one I stole from the poker gamebox worked well. If I made it too dark it becomes harder to pick out things and see whats really going on. Maybe I'll tint it brown or something.

You can see a mock game in progress with the dungeon layout started. Dont worry about being able to read the cards as its super easy to smoothly zoom in and read them. Its really nice to be able to zoom in and out. The decks on the side to pull cards from are also easy to move as a stack so if the board needs to expand that way its no big deal.

There are a couple player tokens on the board, basically just circles cut from the hero cards. I think I need to do something with them like add a border or something since they are a kinda hard to just pick out.

Play Mat
Here is the play mat I came up with. Where you see the card backs is where you place your cards. So you can see one of two quest slots filled there, one of three monsters in your "Pack" area, and just below that is where you can place your treasures/boons/banes. The Hero card is on the top right. Above the Hero card is a tracker for your level (yellow) and health (blue). To the left are your Glory and Peril (green/red) trackers. Below the Hero card is a little summary sheet with icon meanings and how turns work.

Along the bottom of the screen is your Hand. Stuff you place in here other players cant see. You can just drag and drop stuff to and from the hand. The hand box is adjustable in size, and it slides out of the way when not in use (or you can pin it so it stays up).

So yeah, thats what Ive got so far. Just some usability stuff to mess with. First the tokens, but then I thought about when people want to play monsters on people. You have to spend their Peril, so do I really want them to have to go to each tab to see if they can play a card? So...still thinking about that one.

[idolminds]

Stuff is available!

Dungeoneer
Sea Rats

They are on different sites because I originally planned to put them both on MediaFire but the Dungeoneer upload kept timing out and crap. So I had to upload it to my ISPs web space instead. When I get to some high speed I'll probably upload to MediaFire.

Little Google search and you can find a PDF of the rules for both games. Dungeoneer is...hard to follow at first. We had to read it and play a game or two before we figured it all out.

[Quemaqua]

Awesome!  We'll have to try it one of these days soon.  Who's in?

[PyroMenace]

Definitely count me in.

[idolminds]

We gave this a test spin, and it worked out pretty well. It crashed on me early on, but after that I didnt seem to have much issue. We used TeamSpeak instead of the built in chat since I like push to talk. But it worked out nice. We learned some stuff like hiding info, you can see other peoples cursors move in realtime as they are doing stuff, etc. Good stuff. I'm going to keep working on other game conversions. Next up I have Somnium, a card game included in the Fall From Heaven 2 Civ4 mod. After that I'm doing Zombies!!!, and then....Doom: The Boardgame.

[Quemaqua]

weeee *giddy*

[TheOtherBelmont]

Oh shit, I should have checked out this thread earlier.  Demon's Souls is taking away all of my attention.  I am definitely interested in this though.

[idolminds]

PS, Somnium is available. Its a really simple game, but fun.

There are 10 suits of 5 cards each. Card values range from 3 to 5.

On your turn you pull of the top card of this deck and flip it over. You can take this card, or try pull another one and flip it over. You can do this as much as you like, however if you end up drawing another card with the same SUIT as a card you've already drawn you lose all those cards.

eg:

You draw the 4 of Dragons, the 6 of Swords, and the 3 of Cups. You can stop and take them all. But if you draw the next card and its the 4 of Swords, you discard all those cards.

There are two special cards in the deck: Death and The Fool. Death simply ends your turn no matter what, forcing you to discard the cards you were pulling. The Fool allows you to steal one card from your opponent. It basically swaps that card into your current pull, so be careful! The same rules apply. If you already have a 4 of Cups and then get The Fool, if you take you opponents 7 of Cups you will lose them both!

Anyway, collect the highest numbered card of each suit that you can. Add them up and the end, high score wins.

EDIT

Also, you can get this much easier to understand rulebook for Dungeoneer.

[idolminds]

Update: Zombies!!! is available at the mediafire link. Currently only has cards from the original release, not the expansions (though I do have the cards for several). Has two scenarios: the first and one that loads automatically is just the standard game, and the other makes use of the Quickplay rules available on BGG.

EDIT

Here is Ticket to Ride, put together by someone else. Sounds like an interesting game to try sometime.

[Quemaqua]

When I take some vacation we're totally going to play all of these.