Welcome

Welcome to the Tablua developers wiki!

The Tablua project background

Board gaming has been around sine the dawn of civilization. Some of the oldest board games known date back to 3500 BC, some even predating the Egyptian dynasties. Games like Tenet and Ur are still being played today.

The project is named after the Latin word tablua, which simply means boardgame.

Even in this age of computer and tablet games, the board gaming community is still very vibrant, in part due to community sites like Board game geek, ConsimWorld and the many game publishers that are still producing lots of great board games. One of the main problems board gamers are faced with today is finding players to meet up with, and space and storage restrictions - large war games takes up a lot of space. Board gaming engines like Vassal, Zuntzu, Cyberboard eliviates these problems, allowing players to play their favorite board games online. Unfortunately current board games engines are either very dated or no longer being actively developed.

This project is mainly inspired by Vassal, a great board game engine written in Java. It allows you to create your own game module and play in real time against other players online. It is written in Swing, and unfortunately its age is beginning to show, with regards to the user interface and the code base.

The main goal of the project is to develop a modern board game engine based on the legacy of Vassal. The project will be based on JavaFX 2.2+ allowing for a modern user interface and cross platform installations.

How to contribute

Everyone with Java development experience and a passion for board gaming are welcome to make contributions to the project. Send an email to me with a short description of yourself and how you would like to contribute to the project.

The project is still in a very early stage, so you will have amble opportunity to influence the design and feature decisions of the project.

Project status

The project is still in a very early. Coding hasn't started yet, but the main requirements and design criterias has been ironed out. In other words, this is still very much a green field project.

The project is currently also looking at setting up a forum, a blog and Jenkins CI, properly using CloudBees.

Main requirements and design goals

The projects main requirements and design goals are defined here.