08 May 2018 Undo/Confirm Turn feature is now available!

Today I'm pleased to announce the availability of a long-awaited feature on the BoardGamePlay: Undo/Confirm Turn!

Undo/Confirm Turn has been (by far!) the most requested feature since BoardGamePlay lauched several months ago, so I had to do something about it.

Now, before I give you some more details about the feature itself, I'd like to outline a couple of points first.

As I mentioned to some of you in the past, my goal for BoardGamePlay has always been to create implementations that are as close to the physical board games experience as possible, so I personally would rather stay away from making things too easy for players (i.e. when everything is calculated for you) and would instead prefer the approach where players are stimulated to be more careful with their turns and do calculations on their own as opposed to let machine do it for them.

This has nothing to do with misclicks or similar kind of issues though - those might indeed be very annoying/frustrating, I agree.

Now, the reason I'm saying all of this is simple: an Undo/Confirm mechanism I just rolled out, does two things:

1. gives you the Cancel/Confirm option for each of your turns
2. fully reflects the new state of the game (spent/gained resources/cards/VPs, pieces on the board, etc.) before you actually submit the turn

First point solves the core issue some of you were suffering from: misclicks and turns made by error, so I hope this new experience will be much more enjoyable than what it used to be in the past.

Second point gives you the advantage of seeing the outcome of your turn before you confirm it: it reflects spent/gained resources/cards/VPs for both yourself and your opponents, so you can try out different action combinations to find the most optimal move before you actually submit your turn.

Now, back to what I said above about the principles I've been trying to follow while implementing games for BoardGamePlay: I personally would rather not have the second point above implemented/available b/c it makes your life so much easier :D, while I'd be more happy to see players doing the calculations and figuring out the best possible move on their own - that's why we like playing the physical board games after all (well, besides of being able to play with others face to face and to experience tactile feelings of touching pieces and moving them around the table, of course :)).

One could argue that I could implement point #1 without implementing point #2, but the thing is: it would be really hard to implement it this way (for multiple reasons, I don't want to dive into details here, but basically it's both the complexity of the implementation and how having just one of the points would affect the user experience in a rather bad way).

So, it had to be either both of them or none.

I'm sure most of you would actually enjoy having both point #1 and #2 (and I have to admit: it does feel pretty cool to be able to see the outcome of your turn before you submit it! :)), while minority (me including) would hopefully not be too disappointed that game engine is now doing more stuff for you (the stuff you were supposed to do on your own! :)).

I personally am fine with making a little sacrifice to keep the majority of the BoardGamePlay members happy!

You've been asking. I've been listening.

Your feedback is what made it happen.

P.S. This new feature is implemented in such a way that it will be available for the other games on the BoardGamePlay as well. For those of you wondering about the new games: I'm currently running a closed beta test of a new game with the game designer and it should become available on the site in the nearest future; it's a smaller, but very thinky abstract game; I have also received a confirmation from a couple of game publishers / copyright holders regarding few more bigger titles I'm interested to implement + I'm in the middle of conversation with few more game publishers, so more games are definitely coming to BGP, it's just a matter of time - both time required for game implementation and back-and-forth with game publishers / copyright holders.

P.P.S. A lot of work has been done in order to introduce Undo/Confirm feature and some new bugs might have been introduced (but I also made many other improvements along the way too - many of them, again, are based on your feedback), so please, play some more games and let me know what you think (or report a bug, if you find one) - your feedback is highly appreciated!

Thanks for being patient and enjoy your games!