Episode: 3062
Title: HPR3062: Vassal: How to play board games while remote
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3062/hpr3062.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:04:53

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,062 for Tuesday the 28th of April 2020.
Today's show is entitled Vassal,
How to Playboard Games While Remote
and is part of the series' tabletop gaming. It is hosted by Klacky
and is about 16 minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is
how to do physical distancing while avoiding social distance using digitized board games.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com
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Hi, I'm Klacky.
These days people are trying to figure out how to do things while remote.
Originally we call this social distancing
but we really want to figure out
how to stay physically distant without becoming socially distant.
For some of us board games are a part of that social component.
The other day a friend of mine contacted me
and he said he discovered Vassal is an open source board game and card game engine
and since the easter was coming
we managed to find a time slot when we were both available
even though we live in different time zones
so yesterday we played a bit of Vassal.
This was the first time we used Vassal
and we only tried one game
so I cannot speak to the engine as a whole.
I'm just going to review the one game we played this one time.
But first a little technical background.
Vassal has a server component and a client component
and both are written in Java.
We didn't try the server component.
You can self-host the server if you want
but we used the default server
which is hosted by the project itself.
You can also run without a server.
If you know each other's IP numbers
you can enter that and run it peer to peer.
But the easy way is to just use the game default settings
and you find these game lobbies
per game module that you want to play
and you find players there and you can create games.
Before you can do any of this, of course you need to install this.
So my friend uses Ubuntu
and he tried to download the stuff available
from the website.
There's a binary you can download.
And they recommend that you use OpenJDK7.
He tried to just run it but it didn't work.
And then he tried to install some older JDK
and it still didn't work.
And he found a Windows computer instead.
And on Windows you just run the game
and if it doesn't find the job it needs,
it can download it and install it for you.
I was lucky.
I also run Ubuntu but I also on the side run Nix.
And in Nix the game is pre-packaged.
So I just NixShell-P vessel
and then boom, I had my vessel there.
On my computer I only have four gigs of RAM
and to avoid running into crazy swapping,
I set my soft limits to three gigabytes per application.
So this immediately led to Java crashing.
So I had to raise those for that process.
And then I could run the game.
Well first of all you need to load a game module.
So we went to the game Wiki
and we found Carcasson
and we downloaded the latest version
and you open module
and then you are running that particular game
and then you connected the game server.
So we found each other there.
We tried to start a new game.
But my game window went black for a long time
and it said it was syncing up with my friend.
And then he's client crashed
because of lack of heap memory.
So that's the first thing we learned.
You need to go into the preferences
and increase the heap memory.
The default is 512 megs
and we increased it to 102 gigabytes.
Then it worked.
But also we saw that
this whole syncing initial game state was dating too long.
So we tried a simpler version.
There's on the same Wiki page
there are several different versions of this rule and tileset.
We tried the Carcasson simple
which is only three megabytes
instead of 36 megabytes.
And using this we managed to connect up quite quickly
and we started playing the game.
So when we first went into the game lobby
we saw that there was another person there
and we thought we were just trying this game out.
So let's not play with this person.
Let's create a new game
and then we go a new game room.
On the server.
And then we go there
and then we start a new game.
But this person followed us to the new game room.
And so now we had a three-player game.
But this was not an intention
but it turned out this was a nice person
and they had a similar level of experience
as we did with both the software and the game.
So we had a really good time
and helped each other out
figuring out how to do things and all that.
So the first surprise.
If you've been playing some computer games
based on card games or board games
this is not it.
This is not a computer game.
This is a board game in computer form.
So the computer doesn't validate your moves
and tell you when you did something wrong.
It doesn't enforce who can play when.
It doesn't count the score
and it doesn't move anything around automatically.
So all it provides is it provides a table.
It provides a pile of cards.
It provides the meeples that you use in Carcasson.
Those are the little human characters
in each player's color that you use
to mark possession on the board.
So you have just this digitized version
of the actual cards and markers game.
And then you use the chat to coordinate with each other.
There's a turn marker.
So if you're a red player
it says red is turn
and then when you finish
you just press plus
and now it says blues turn.
But you can press minus again and go back
and so you still...
We thought this was going to be an annoyance
but it turned out that...
It actually makes it more board game-like
and it makes it especially when we had a third person
that wasn't on audio.
So my friend and I were on audio
and this third person was only on chat.
And because the game didn't do everything for us
it became more social,
even with this third person.
Because we discussed...
Oh, sorry, it's my turn now.
I didn't notice.
Or can I play this card?
I'm not sure.
Let's check the rules
and then we check some rules online
and both my friend and our guest
had paper rules on hand.
So we looked up things in the rules
and we actually learned some difference
between the first and second and third edition
of Carcasson as we went on.
So can you do this?
I'm not sure.
How many score...
How many points do I get for this?
Oh, it says here in the second edition
you get two points
but in the third edition you get four points.
So that was...
Actually, yeah, pretty social experience
playing this game.
So how you play the game is like this.
First, you need to decide what game to play.
So you file open module
and then once you've loaded the module
you get a new window.
Now you're in the module.
You see the game server
and the game lobbies,
the rooms on your upper right
and you either stay in the main lobby
or you create a new room.
And once you're in there
you choose new game
and then the game starts
and you get these controls up.
So most of your window will be
the table is just white
with some black lines
to indicate where the tile should go.
And then you have one window
with cards and meeples.
So you have the
face down card pile
and when it's your turn
you drag a card from there
to the empty
card placeholder.
And when you do that it turns up.
You see what kind of tile you got
and then you drag it from there
onto the table.
You can rotate it
90 degrees right and left
until it's oriented the way you want it to.
And then you can drag a meeple down there.
And then when you're done
you get a plus on the turn marker.
And it's always I think
configured to six players.
So if you're fewer players
you're just going to have to press plus
a couple of times until
you come to a color that actually has a player.
And you choose when you join the game
which color you should have
but the game doesn't really enforce anything.
So it's more like a convention
when you play.
The other person is blue
and the third person is black.
And then there's a
third window apart from the
table where you place the tiles
and the meeples window
where you have the tiles and meeples
to play from.
And you also have the
scoring window.
So that's where you have
you have small meeples
that you can place.
And it's just a graphic.
And then you just take
your meeple sprite
and you drag it to
the five points
place. It doesn't even
snap into place or anything.
You just move these pictures around
and that's the way you keep track
of your score as the game goes.
And then at the end of the game
you placed all the tiles
and then
we just talk to each other.
Okay, let's count three.
The red player first
and so we went through
and checked. Oh, it's
on these finished cities
and we have one meeple here
on an open city, one here on the field
and then we just counted everything together.
Okay, now we're done with red player.
Let's do black player.
And in the end our guest won
the game
because I had made a silly mistake.
I was owning all of the grassland
and was going to get a lot of scores
for all the cities that were in there.
But close to the end of the game,
I bridged my grassland
with the little grassland owned
by the third player.
So we had to share that equally
and he came out
far ahead of the other two of us.
We had a really good experience
playing this game. It worked really well
once you figured out
how it worked
and that you had to do everything
for yourself.
And we only got stuck
maybe one or two times
where the UI got in some weird state
so we couldn't move a tile.
But then actually there's an
undo function.
So we could just undo
and get back to a previous state
that worked.
I think we spent
less than two hours.
Maybe we played one and a half hour.
I'm not sure. It was a bit slow
and we were figuring everything out.
But in the second half of the game,
so we had like 30 cards left
and I think we played that
in about half an hour.
So when pretty smooth
and actually chatting
is a pretty decent interface
to handle all this back and forth
and am I supposed to place this here
and those things.
So I would definitely do this again
and I would recommend others
to try it out.
And if you want to go
more geeky
then you can also set up your own game server
and you can also
try to connect peer to peer
especially on a land
that would probably work really well.
But otherwise
I would definitely do this again
and I would recommend others
to try it out.
But otherwise
the default server
worked really well for us.
I don't know how many people are playing this game.
There's a status page on the website
and I'm going to check it out and see
what games people actually play.
I was quite surprised because
there are
probably hundreds of different rule sets
and we happened to pick one
where there was a person there active
and waiting
and notice that we were there
and even joined our game room and everything.
I don't know how common that experience is.
It probably depends a lot on which rule set you pick.
We didn't have this when we chose
the latest version of Carcasson
it was only when we went back to this
simple version.
And also
I don't know how
the other rule sets work
if there are some
rule sets that are
more stringent
and help you more and calculate your score
or if this is just
a thing like this is the culture around
Vassal that you just provide the
cards and the markers
and then the players do everything
like in a normal board game.
I'd have to try more games
to know how that works.
Anyway, that's
all I had to say about this game.
It was fun.
We had a good time and
it worked well enough.
I'm Klake. You can find me
on the free social web
at
klakeatlibranet.org.
We played
the game Vassal, which is
available at
vasalengine1word.org.
There are links
in the show notes to
the game and to
the particular
rule set that we played.
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public radio.
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