App for automatic scoring -- ideas?
I played a round of Ticket To Ride yesterday, and while scoring it had one of those "Wouldn't it be neat?" moments. What if you could just take pictures of the board, and of each player's route cards, and have an app calculate all the scores?
As far as I can tell, most board game score apps available today are for keeping track of scores across plays, or are simple aids for tallying up scores where you are entering a bunch of numbers.
The core idea is that I could use deep learning so the app will recognize play pieces on the board. From there, I think it should be fairly straightforward to have it calculate scores.
So what I'd love to get some ideas from you on, what would be a good game to try writing this for? Something that isn't super, super popular because I want to start "small" so I don't get overwhelmed with support issues right away. Also, something where the score can be calculated entirely at the end, and it's at least a little annoying to do it manually.
Aside from suggestions for what game(s) to support first, are there any features you'd suggest, or stuff you love/hate about other board game companion apps you've used?
Are there any sites or communities where people regularly upload pictures of a game board and/or cards after it's been played? I'll need a bunch of pictures like that which can be used for training the neutral net(s).
FWIW, I don't really see a "business opportunity" here. It's a niche within a niche, and this isn't going to be something that anyone spends much time using, so ad-supported is kind of out. So, if I go forward with this, it'll be for fun and practice.
Posted Feb 12, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC
Well...
https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/bci7cc/pointsman_scores_ttr_using_cameraai/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Wow. I'm not surprised that someone else had the same idea (it's pretty obvious) and ran with it, but wow that's a very, very well done implemention! Also, I love the details that the developer provided about their approach and tech stack. Thanks for the link, much appreciated!