Hi HN,

I built this digital version of Tiao, a two-player turn based strategy board game. Think Checkers meets Go. It's free, runs in the browser, has multiplayer, AI, over the board mode and a lot of other neat things. The source is on GitHub (AGPL).

The game was originally designed by my friend Andreas Edmeier. He created the rules and has been playtesting and refining the game design for years. I built the website for it. The core in about 2 weeks using TypeScript, Next.js, Express, Websockets, and MongoDB. Fully dockerized, deployed on a Hetzner VPS with Coolify. Authentication with better-auth. Real-time gameplay, ELO matchmaking, OpenPanel analytics, and a fully functional achievements system.

Play it: https://playtiao.com Source: https://github.com/trebeljahr/tiao

Happy to answer questions about the tech, the game design, or anything else.

My hope is that more people will play this game because I think it is genuinely fun and would be cool to one day see people play this on a Go board or on their phones/computers.

Have a good one.

Hey! I played against a bot and it was pretty fun.

Small suggestion: too many queues can make it very difficult to build up a network of players at first. I'd suggest, for now, lowering the amount of available time control queues so that two players who happen to be on at the same time are more likely to actually find a game.

I loved this.

A shameless plug for myself and my own investigations into the world of old strategy games - https://tom-dickson.com/blog/trias-game-investigation/ - was where I did an investigation into the game called Trias/ternii lapilli which is like an old version of tic tac toe.

Cool concept! I play Go, and it's extremely unnerving that all the good shapes you play in Go are essentially the worst shapes you can play in Tiao :D

Cool! I've tried (and I guess failed) to build two of my favourite combinatorial games: the ancient "Konane" and the modern "Shōbu". At least the latter's project taught me property-based testing in Erlang.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dnane

https://boardgamegeek.com/video/482389/shobu/how-to-play-sho...

It's fun! I play some chess but I am not a natural at this game. I think I need an AI easier than easy haha

I can't beat easy, incredibly addictive game :)

Clever! I really appreciate how well done the tutorial is, it's just about the easiest game intro I've ever experienced.

great game and very nice implementation!

Now I am interested in playing a board game that is not turn-based

I appreciate the tutorial. I thought it was well done. I'd love to see something like that in some board games I've played.

Oh wow I am terrible at this

Nice implementation though, plays pretty well in n my little bitty mobile screen