Welcome to QBoard

QBoard is a UI for playing near-arbitrary board games. It is mainly intended as a prototyping platform for testing/playing my own boardgame designs.

QBoard is a "re-imagining" of a much older project of mine called the Q Universal Boardgame. QUB was quite monolithic, and its sheer size eventually caused its downfall. While QBoard originally aimed to be a fairly minimalistic application, Qt makes it pretty easy to just keep adding features, so QBoard already does a lot more than was originally planned.

For information on getting started with QBoard, see HOWTOGettingStarted.

Screenshots

You can find screenshots on the screenshots page.

What can one do with QBoard?

Some things QBoard can be used for:

• Quickly prototype boardgame designs.
• Play boardgames for which you have appropriate graphics.
• PBEM (play-by-email) gaming
• Maintaining maps for a roleplaying game. e.g. a campaign map can be annotated, locations of the characters can be recorded with counters, etc.
• For me, programming it has been a good way to burn hundreds of hours which i should have spent with my girlfriend and my dog.

Features

• A simple interface for quickly setting up and playing a boardgame.
• Has powerful and flexible save and load features, making it easy to add load/save support for new data types.
• Get right to playing - there is no tedious separate setup of "gameset" and "scenario" files, as there is in, e.g., CyberBoard (arguably the most well-known application in this category).
• Has no inherent limits on how many pieces can be in play. It has been shown to easily handle more than 500 at a time.
• As QBoard has only a fluid concept of what a "game" is, it is possible to mix and match pieces from arbitrary Gamesets in the same session.
• A zoomable, rotatable playing area (game board + pieces).
• Full control over game piece background colors, transparency, rotation, and border (color, transparency, size, line style). Finally: translucent game pieces!
• Supports an arbitrary number of dockable "minimap" views, all fully interactive and synchronized in real time.
• On-board HTML widgets, so you can annotate your game as much as you like. You can also attach HTML widgets directly to arbitrary game pieces.
• On-board "dots", with varying sizes and transparency, can be used as pieces by themselves or e.g. as state markers.
• On-board lines, with customizable colors, line size, and transparency level. Useful for marking movement paths (or histories), firing ranges or arcs, line of sight, and such.
• Pieces can have "child objects" which follow them around when the piece is dragged. e.g. one can add a text label, a record form, or status markers to any piece.
• Use copy, paste, and cloning to quickly set up an army of pieces.
• "Shuffle" any items by selecting several items and using the Shuffle menu option. Useful for cards, simulating a cup of chits, and randomizing piece selection or placement.
• JavaScript bindings are under developement. The basic stuff works, but this work is ongoing.
• Built-in wiki viewer which supports most of the wiki syntax provided by Google Code Wiki (e.g. this page).

See also: the TODOs Page

Requirements

• Patience. It's beta software.
• An implementation of the standard C++ STL. Most compiler environments have this built in.
• Qt 4.3.x or 4.4.x with STL support enabled and optionally with OpenGL. QBoard seems to work with Qt 4.3.0-4.3.5, but sometimes shows some significantly weird behaviours which don't show up on 4.4.
• Platforms: it tries to be platform-independent, and it "should" work on any Qt platform which supports all the big Qt features (e.g. QWebKit, STL, etc.). i would love to hear from anyone who tries it on non-Linux platforms.
• Some graphics which you can use as game boards and playing pieces. We've got some free gaming maps at http://wanderinghorse.net/gaming/maps and free counters (playing pieces) at http://wanderinghorse.net/gaming/counters.
• libs11n 1.2.7+. It comes with a standalone copy of s11n, so you don't need to download it. s11n requires a fairly recent C++ compiler - gcc 4.1+ are believed to be okay, as are newer MS compilers.

Development Status

QBoard is very much beta software. It runs fine, but some important features are as yet unimplemented, and some other things will probably change significantly over time. QBoard is not a project which aims to ever have a "1.0" release, and to that end it uses the release date, in YYYYMMDD format, as a version number.

The copy of the source code in Subversion may or may not work at any given moment (normally it does, though). Occasionally it reaches a point where we say, "it works! Ship it!" Those are the "official" releases (available via the downloads link), and are believed to be free of major defects (e.g. crashes or other data loss).

That said - there will be times when a release is not strictly backwards-compatible (i.e. cannot read all data written with an earlier version). This will probably be minimal, however, because the i/o layer allows us to easily support multiple versions of an object's i/o format in many cases. There are never any guarantees that an older version of QBoard can read all data written by a newer version.