Boardgame.io Notes

Boardgame.io is a Javascript library to help write turn-based games on the web.

Players and the Game Master

You create a client with the game object. You may or may not pass in a multiplayer parameter.

Not using multiplayer basically means that everyone sees the same board, on the same physical screen. There’s one client, one rendered board, etc. You could use this way for tic-tac-toe, checkers, chess - any game that doesn’t really have any secrets and where the player state is public knowledge.

In this kind of setup, a player would make a move and then pass the game (tablet? laptop?) to the next player and they would make the next move. It’s actually quite similar to a real board game.

Using multiplayer

You can pass in a multiplayer parameter to the game client and this turns it into a multiplayer game. For this to work you also need to supply a playerID to the client. A client is only attached to one player now - without a playerID, the user is considered a spectator, able to watch but unable to make moves.

The multiplayer parameter can be Local(), in which case the game master runs in the browser. You’ll need to render a different client per player, but it has to be on the same page, because reloading the client on a different page, ostensibly for a different player, will give that player a different game, since the information is all stored in memory.

(Note: I guess you could render each player’s client in a different tab on the same page. Might be a good way to prototype a multiplayer experience)

You can get around this single page limitation by supplying storage options to the Local master:

Local({
  // Enable localStorage cache.
  persist: true,

  // Set custom prefix to store data under. Default: 'bgio'.
  storageKey: 'bgio',
});

With this you can render a different client in different browser tabs, with different players - though it the clients are not automatically kept in sync; you’ll have to update the page after a different player makes a move.