The number of times that people ask, can you use Blinks to play Catan is surely more than I can recall. While our goal with the Blinks platform is to allow for creativity to run wild, the act of recreating a game or augmenting a game is creative unto itself.
Admittedly, I think Catan is a beautiful game as-is, but this creator, Sam March, has done a nice job of augmenting the game with a digital game board seen here
I feel inspired, and maybe others in the forum are as well to recreate functionality seen here for a game with 19 Blinks (or 21 if you include 2 Widgets dice to do your rolls).
I believe this is a great opportunity to use @BGA’s mapping library to first validate that the board is in fact setup for Catan with 19 Blinks, and then provide an easy way to display results like dice roll. In the header image we see a 4 displayed, here is a swing at a font for all 12 numbers:
With Blinks, we can even go more detailed since we have the 6 individual pixels inside of each Blink (if someone wants to get really fancy, I bet some anti-aliasing is possible too
Building in the game logic, creating displays for the different resources, somehow displaying the number that would be placed on top of each location… which really, the most important part is how far from 7 it is, this leaves room for some creativity such as it displaying how far from 7 it is, but when pressed, the map reveals the actual number.
Each of the pieces feel pretty clear, I am curious if anyone else has attempted to do this with Blinks. Either way, it feels like a fun experiment to build the pieces for. Looking forward to sharing other thoughts on this here as well.
I did think about this befor, simply because of the shape of the tiles. But there is a major problem with the recurces. With blinks alone you can’t really have hand-cards. But I guess you thought about using blinks as the map only and having additional cards / streets / houses / castles. They’d have to be made for blinks specially, but I gueass that wouldn’t be too hard.
Still it is quite difficult to display numbers von 2 to 12 with only 6 pixels on each blink. The recources on the map could be made with colors/patterns, but the dice-chance is hard to show.
Maybe with a more simplyfied version it was possible, showing diffrent patterns for diffrent chances (but making it hard for color-blind persons)
One option for displaying numbers would be assigning each tile it’s number, but instead of displaying the number, display the number of pips (black circles under the actual board game numbers) that show the probability of that number being rolled. The number of in game pips range from 1-5, so this can be easily indicated. When the number is rolled, the same brightening or flashing of the blinks can be applied to indicate that that resource tile was productive.
May I suggest that an indicator, either an underline [[As in Uno]] or a “period” or some other notation be used to orient the numbers? 6 and 9 are ambiguous, I’m not sure that 2 and 5 need it, but they are in a similar situation to 6 and 9 here, with the given implementation.
It might be a little over the top, but wouldn’t it be even more accurate by using only some faces of some blinks than doing it full? By shaping a little more you could solve mix-ups like that. (But mostly the 7 looking like ? without the gap… it looks so wiered to me, but it’s just me, I guess)
It could also go by diffrent colors, but if there is f.e. 1-6 blue / 7-12 red, it wouldn’t solve it for 2 and 5. Or make all the odd numbers blue, all the even red or something. But that would have to be remembered then and isn’t a visual right away, like a dot. You would have to know, if you aren’t sure.
As soon as I have some time I will work on getting the number display working.