From Board Game to Single Page Web App: A Full-Stack Developer‘s Guide

Board games are booming. The tabletop gaming industry grew by 20% in 2020 alone to reach over $11 billion in revenue. And with the pandemic driving more people than ever to seek out engaging home entertainment, that growth shows no signs of slowing.

For web developers, this presents an exciting opportunity. By leveraging the power and flexibility of modern web technologies, we can adapt beloved board games into digital experiences that anyone can play on their computer or phone. In this guide, I‘ll walk through the entire process of building a single page app version of a board game from start to finish.

Choosing the Right Game to Adapt

The first key to a successful board game app is choosing the right game to adapt. While it‘s possible to translate almost any tabletop game to digital, some definitely work better than others. In general, you want to look for games with:

• Simple, elegant rulesets that can be easily modeled in code
• A limited set of components and assets to create
• Turn-based play that maps well to digital interaction patterns
• Themes and mechanics that are engaging in a solo play context

Some specific types of board games that tend to work well as digital adaptations:

• Abstract strategy games (chess, go, Azul)
• Eurogames (Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan)
• Deckbuilders (Dominion, Ascension, Star Realms)
• Solo or cooperative games (Pandemic, Spirit Island, Gloomhaven)

Party games, dexterity games, social deduction, and heavily thematic games are trickier to implement convincingly as single-player digital experiences. They tend to rely more heavily on in-person social dynamics and physical components.

Of course, there are always exceptions. Jackbox Games has had great success bringing a variety of party games to digital. And games like Monopoly and Scrabble have proven enduringly popular in app form by leaning into their social nature with asynchronous multiplayer and chat features.

Planning the Implementation

With a good candidate game chosen, the next step is to thoroughly plan out the app implementation. I‘ve found it very helpful to approach this in layers, starting high-level and then drilling down into specifics:

1. Define the key nouns and verbs of the game conceptually
2. Determine what UI views will be needed to represent game states and afford player actions
3. Spec out the technical details of the game engine
4. Create wireframes and concept art to establish the look and feel
5. Plan the development roadmap and estimate the effort required

Let‘s look at each of these in turn.

Defining Nouns & Verbs

Most modern board games can be conceptually modeled using a few key nouns:

• Players – the participants in the game
• Pieces – the physical bits like pawns, cards, tiles, and tokens
• Board – the play space, often a literal board but sometimes just a conceptual space
• Zones – distinct areas of the board (squares, spots, hands, decks, etc)
• State – key global properties (turn order, score, game phase, etc)

And a set of verbs representing the actions players can take:

• Place a piece
• Move a piece
• Draw a card/tile
• Play a card/tile
• Discard
• Trade/Exchange
• Attack/Capture
• Score points
• End turn/round/game

For example, here‘s how we might break down the classic board game Carcassonne into these concepts:

Nouns

• Players (2-5)
• Tiles (72 land tiles)
• Meeples (40 follower tokens)
• Board (the map of placed tiles)
• Zones (City, Road, Cloister, Field)
• State (current player, scores)

Verbs

• Place a tile
• Place a meeple on a tile
• Score a completed zone
• Return a meeple to supply
• Draw a new tile
• End turn

Mapping out the key nouns and verbs like this provides a solid conceptual foundation to start designing the app. It helps clarify what the UI will need to represent, and what types of actions the player can take.

UI Views & Player Actions

The next step is to decide how to translate the conceptual nouns and verbs into concrete UI views and player actions. The goal is to create an efficient, intuitive mapping between the physical game components and their digital representations.

Some key considerations:

• What are the discrete visual elements that need to be represented on screen?
• How can the spatial relationships and groupings be preserved?
• What are the points of player interaction and when do they occur?
• How will players be prompted to take actions?
• What feedback will they receive?

Continuing our Carcassonne example, we might define the following views:

• Game Board – grid of placed tiles
• Tile Draw Pile – stack of remaining tiles
• Player Mats – panels showing each player‘s name, color, and score
• Zoom View – detailed close-up of a tile or zone
• Scoreboard – list of players sorted by score
• Action Prompt – contextual prompt indicating available actions

And player actions:

1. Drag a tile from draw pile to place on board
2. Click to rotate tile
3. Click to place meeple on tile zone
4. Click to confirm tile/meeple placement and end turn

Interactive wireframes can be very helpful to prototype and test the flow between these views and actions. Tools like Figma, Sketch, or even simple paper sketches are great for this.

The key is to arrive at a complete, detailed picture of how the game will be represented and controlled through the UI before starting to build it. Defining all the views and actions up front saves a ton of time and rework later.

Technical Architecture

With the UI and player interactions specced out, we can start drilling down into the technical architecture. For most single page board game apps, this will involve three main layers:

1. Game Engine – the core rules, logic, and state management
2. UI Views – visual components to represent game state
3. Control Mappings – translates player actions into state updates

The game engine is the heart of the app. It encodes the game rules in a data structure representing the current state, along with pure functions defining how that state can transition in response to player actions.

Here‘s a simplified example of how this might look in JavaScript for Carcassonne:

// Define game constants
const MAX_PLAYERS = 5;
const TILE_TYPES = [‘CITY‘,‘ROAD‘,‘CLOISTER‘,‘FIELD‘];

// Initialize game state
let gameState = {
  players: [],
  scores: {},
  currentPlayerIdx: 0,
  board: [],
  drawPile: [],
  placedTiles: 0
};

// Define pure game logic functions
function drawTile(state) {
  const drawnTile = state.drawPile.shift();
  return { ...state, drawnTile }; 
}

function placeTile(state, tile, row, col) {
  if (!isValidPlacement(state, row, col)) throw new Error(‘Invalid tile placement‘);

  const newBoard = [...state.board];
  newBoard[row][col] = tile;

  return {
    ...state,
    board: newBoard,
    placedTiles: state.placedTiles + 1
  };
}
// ...more game logic functions for placing meeples, scoring, etc...

// Define a game reducer to handle state transitions 
function gameReducer(state, action) {
  switch (action.type) {
    case ‘START_GAME‘:
      return initializeGame(action.players); 
    case ‘PLACE_TILE‘:
      return placeTile(state, action.tile, action.row, action.col);
    case ‘DRAW_TILE‘:
      return drawTile(state);
    default:
      return state;
  }
}

With the game logic defined, the UI views can be implemented as pure, declarative functions of state using a framework like React or Vue. Here‘s a simplified example component:

function GameBoard({ state }) {
  return (
    <div className="board">
      { 
        state.board.map((row, rowIdx) => (
          <div className="row" key={rowIdx}>
            {
              row.map((tile, colIdx) => (
                <Tile 
                  tile={tile}
                  key={tile.id} 
                  onClick={() => onPlaceTile(tile, rowIdx, colIdx)}
                />
              ))
            }
          </div>
        )
      }
    </div>
  );
}

Player actions are handled by dispatching action objects through the reducer to trigger state updates and re-renders:

function onPlaceTile(tile, row, col) {
  dispatch({ 
    type: ‘PLACE_TILE‘, 
    tile,
    row,
    col
  });
}

With this reactive unidirectional data flow, complex games are broken down into a series of simple state transitions. This architecture makes the game logic easier to reason about, test, and debug.

Other architectural considerations:

• Keep the game logic decoupled from the UI to enable porting to multiple platforms
• Use selectors and memoization to efficiently calculate derived data from game state
• Avoid mutation and side-effects to keep everything predictable
• Organize files by feature vs. type for maintainability

Art & Assets

Compelling visuals and sound breathe life into the board game and significantly enhance the player experience. Hiring a professional game artist is ideal if you have the budget, but there are also many affordable asset packs available for common game themes and components.

When planning out the art needed for a board game app, consider:

• Tile/card artwork
• Board backgrounds
• Player avatars
• Unique component artwork (meeples, tokens, etc)
• Iconography for actions, currency, stats, etc
• Logo and title screen
• Animations and visual effects
• Music tracks and sound effects

If creating art from scratch, I recommend a style guide to ensure consistency across the app. Vector graphics (SVG) and sprite sheets can help keep the assets lightweight and flexible.

Putting it All Together

With the design and architecture thoroughly planned out, it‘s (finally) time to start building! I like to break this down into a few key phases:

1. App shell & game engine – get the core game loop and state management working headless
2. UI views & game board – implement the visual components one by one
3. Player actions & interactivity – wire up the UI to dispatch actions and trigger state updates
4. Visual & audio polish – splash screen, sound effects, animations, etc
5. AI opponents (optional) – implement computer-controlled players and difficulty levels
6. Multiplayer (optional) – add support for multiple human players locally or online

This phased approach allows you to incrementally develop and test the game, catching bugs early while they are easier to diagnose and fix.

Some tips I‘ve found helpful for staying organized and efficient:

• Use a Kanban board or other task tracking system to manage the backlog
• Automate tasks like asset optimization, testing, and deployment
• Continuously deploy to a staging environment for playtesting
• Squash bugs ruthlessly and write regression tests to prevent them returning
• Actively seek feedback from other developers and potential players
• Set a firm deadline to avoid scope creep and perfectionism

Measuring Success

As with any software product, it‘s important to define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the success of your board game app. Common KPIs for games include:

• Downloads/installs
• Daily/monthly active users
• Average session length
• Retention (day 1, 7, 30)
• Lifetime value per player
• User ratings/reviews

Instrumenting your app with analytics will help you understand how players are engaging with it and identify areas for improvement. I‘m a big fan of open source analytics tools like Matomo or Plausible for this.

It‘s also critical to actively solicit qualitative feedback through user testing, surveys, and community forums. The best insights for refining the game will come directly from players.

Wrap Up

Building a web app version of a board game is a complex but rewarding endeavor. I‘ve found the most successful adaptations are born out of a genuine love for the source material, tempered with a realistic understanding of the constraints and affordances of the digital medium.

When executed well, a single-page board game app can become an enduring way for fans to enjoy the game at any time. But it‘s not an easy or quick process. Even a relatively simple game can take hundreds of hours of development and polish to faithfully adapt.

Some of the most popular digital board game implementations include:

• Carcassonne (Web, iOS, Android)
• Settlers of Catan (Web, iOS, Android, Steam)
• Ticket to Ride (Web, iOS, Android, Steam)
• Dominion (Web)
• Star Realms (Web, iOS, Android, Steam)

If you‘re considering taking on the challenge yourself, I highly recommend playing through some of these for inspiration and to see how they solve common design challenges. And if you do decide to take the plunge, I hope this guide provides a helpful roadmap to bring your dream project to life.

Happy gaming!