How to make a digital version

Playtesting

I did more playtesting over the weekend.

Got my first hard "nope".  Someone played one round and just bounced.  To be expected, not too upset about it.

Everyone else seemed to enjoy it and wanted to play more.

Some interesting take-aways: 

For the cooperative version (at the very least) I am realizing that all the restrictions around where things go are not really necessary.  I am curious to try a more "wild west" approach where things could be placed pretty much anywhere on the factory floor.

There's a tension in the design: 

• For a particular challenge, there's a "thing" I want to happen.  E.g. for first challenge, if the Nut Dispensers go Almond then Peanut and the Orders go Peanut then Almond, there's no way to finish the Challenge without at least one Cross Tile.
• Players will fail and redo Challenges.  There should be some variance when things are retried or it may become too easy.
• The cards you use to do Actions will always be different so I guess there's some variance/
• Beyond that, it'd be nice if the elements on the factory floor moved a little bit so that it's not exactly the same.

So how do you do that?  On the one hand, when challenge is replayed I want to preserve the "thing".  So some aspects of the layout need to stay the same.

On the other hand, I don't want it to be exactly the same, so that there's some novelty to the replay (and you can't just "figure it out" before you even start playing).

Some thoughts on this: 

• I could have physical cards describing the layout for each challenge.  These might include some iconography that supports variance/randomization (like "put a Nut Dispenser in a random slot in this set of slots).  But that could get confusing to read (especially for first time players) and it also requires a bit of tedium: instead of just "put this here" you need to do some randomizing effect when setting up the board.  Minus fun points.
• I could have a companion app.  You tell app  "I am doing challenge X" and it generates a board for you, based on built-in parameters for challenge X.
• Nice solution that gets you both "random" and "easy to read".
• Makes the final deliverable that much more complicated: now we need a box and a companion app.
• I'm hoping for a "viral" effect where we encourage players to create and share challenges.  These user-created challenges would not be in the app: just a fixed board setup.
• Maybe it doesn't matter?  Maybe 
• Card variance is enough to make it replayable.
• It's OK to do exactly the same thing.  If you failed the first time it's fine to sit back, consider a new strategy, see if you can pull it off.

Digital Version

I would really like to make a digital version of this, ASAP, for mass playtests.

Required features: 

• Easy to code/distribute.
• Free to test players.
• Ability to collect and process metrics (so I can, for example, see a log of a game, or see in aggregate that players take n tries to clear this challenge, or whatever.

Looking at Roblox or BGA.

Roblox is not a natural choice for this (no deep support for boardgames, it's more for open world exploration) but I worked there for 7 years so I know the code, tools, and team very well. The big downside is I'd be adding a non-trivial amount of "chrome" just to set up the basic framework to play a boardgame: creating a table, invite system, etc.  It is free to play, multiplatform, and can do analytics.

BoardGameArena is web-based framework to build boardgames.  I am pretty sure it could do analytics and pretty sure people could create tables and play for free (researching now).  The big downside is that I don't know the framework well, or some of the langauges/tech involved (sql and php).  I am sure I could learn them, I just... get scared of learning new stuff.  Once I'm over the hump I'll be fine but I just feel this panic feeling at the beginning of any learning curve.