Leadrboard

Inspiration

Our team has a long history of playing board games. Back in the pre-COVID days, there's a good chance you would've heard us trying to deceive each other in Coop or begging each other for trades in Catan.

Of course, COVID brought all of that to a halt.

Now that things are starting to come back and games are beginning to pick up once again, we wanted a way to get back into board games more then ever before. That's why we created Leadrboard.

What it does

At its core, Leadrboard tracks game statistics across groups of people. These's "leagues" as we call them could be with anyone - from the Friday Night DnD group that causally plays to the competitive coop night that hosts daily tournaments. Leadrboard is designed to be as simple as possible to track people's progression over time.

How we built it

In order to make sure that Leadrboard does this as best as possible, we started out by designing User Personas in Figma and assessing what an app like this would need. We then created a prototype of all the screens that we thought would be necessary. Flow charts helped to visualize what the user flow would look like.

After that, we started work on the technical side. We decided to build a simple mobile app for both iOS and Android using React Native in order to speed up the development process as well as use our team's experience in React.

The apps talk through secure HTTPS channels to a backend server running a Kotlin version of Spring Boot. Any data that needs to be persisted is passed through to an Azure SQL Database for structured/relational data, or Blob Storage for unstructured data like images.

Challenges we ran into

Unfortunately, we had the classic hackathon case of dreaming too big. Many of our features simply took too long to implement, and we didn't end up being able to tackle some of the bigger features such as league creation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

That being said, we're still proud to be able to present a working MVP that more or less does what we intended it to. With some help via manual database inserts, players are still able to see the games their league plays and log plays with winners attached.

What's next for Leadrboard

Before anything, we'd like to get self-service features such as league creation up and running. It's not feasible to release the project if we're needing to manually create leagues for each and every group!

After that, we'd like to beef up our data visualizations. With the data involved, there's a lot of interesting and informative graphs we could generate that we know players would want to see.

Finally, we have a lot of ideas about future plans such as recommendation systems. One of the hardest challenges our board game group faces is deciding which game to play once we've all gotten together. We imaging Leadrboard could search through the league's history and recommend games that maximize different aspects of games, such as competitiveness within the currently playing players or new/novel games.