Digitable progress report #0

Digitable is a free and open source board game engine. It combines designing the game, playtesting the game and publishing the game in one platform.

The main goal of Digitable is to reduce the amount of iteration needed between designing and playtesting. Digitables focus is fast protoyping. You can start out with a first idea in Digitable. Create a card template and a couple of cards that use that template. Then it is just one click to create a playtesting link and share it with your friends to start playtesting. My games are usually perfect on the first try, but if yours aren’t you can then edit your design, change the cards add more or remove them and jump right back into playtesting. This helps you to try out ideas faster and leads to creating more games that are better designed in a shorter time. After you finished playtesting you can publish the boardgame online and share it with the world

All the code for Digitable is free and open source. This means anybody can edit the source code and change it. It is a guarantee against me turning evil and if I ever turn evil you can just take the project and fork it. This openness is the foundation that Digitable is built on. This also means that you can just use normal files. Nothing is locked on a cloud server. Digitable uses svg files for designs and csv files for data. So you can use whatever software you want to design your cards as long as it can create svgs. E.g. TODO more examples here You can just use normal excel to edit the csv files! No vendor lockin.

This open source focus is the main motivation for me to create Digitable. I almost exclusively use open source software (nixos btw) and never want to use some SAAS with a monthly subscription fee. Blender has become the go to software for a lot of 3d designers everybody can start using it immediately without having to worry about someone trying to extract their value later. It isn’t locked behind institutional access. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you are you can start making movies. It is something that is true about writing software as well. I am not limited by outside factors, like an architect might be. There are no excuses not to build what I want. This is what I want for boardgames as well. I don’t want the future of boardgames to be different projects extracting rent from you. Instead I hope for the future of boardgame design to be built on openness. My take on that is digitable.

If you have any ideas, feedback or just want to chat about boardgame design, join the discord. For software developers checkout the repository. To keep up with the progress of Digitable subscribe to the Newsletter. It will be sent every 4 weeks or when something big has happened.