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

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Your_sanctuarY•
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WhileTrueOP•

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!

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onionyButtons MOFO•

Not something I would use as I just get my valet to do it and email me the scores.

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sylpher250•

I use my slaves fakirs for the same purpose

5
KiwasiGames•

Dominant Species final scoring would be great. Its technically all based on the public board state.

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CatTaxAuditorFive Tribes•

It's a bit of a tricky question. I can't think of a lot of games where the final state of the board represents all of the points scored over the entire arc of the game that are also not as simple as adding an amount of integers together. Ticket to Ride seems to be your best bet. Going small will mean that you won't really have all that much to draw on to teach the machine learning you want to use. Maybe Kingdomino would be a good fit? Other than those two, I am drawing a blank.

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5howboat•

Kingdomino is a great suggestion. Castles of Mad King Ludwig would be pretty awesome, but that seems much harder to implement. Maybe Abyss, Puerto Rico, Sprawlopolis, Friday is just counting numbers, cards and life markers.

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WhileTrueOP•

Kingdomino is an excellent suggestion! Pretty likely that's what I'll start with. Detecting and classifying tiles is one of the easier deep learning tasks, which is good since it'll be my first "real" project (i.e. not for school). Doesn't hurt that I already have a copy of the game, either.

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lightning_fire•

Wingspan may be doable. The only thing not counted at the end is round bonuses, and those are tracked with markers. Cached cards would be tricky I guess.

Tokaido is another, it's all based on the cards you have at the end.

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exonwarriorScythe•

It sounds like a cool idea, but games where I would use this (like Stone Age or Scythe) would be difficult to take a picture of for it to work. Especially Stone Age with all the civilization cards.

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moose51789•

One of those things I've deabated on starting recently is building a web app that's sole purpose is scoring games in an easy manner that walks through in an easy way the things to score the game without needing pen0paper and even calculator. I'm not sure how I can do so but it's something I wanna conceptualize at least. Machine learning with camera would be cool too....

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automator3000•

Of all the games to desire an app to score, why TtR? (Also, the post from yesterday about Scrabble ... I mean, didn't you learn basic arithmetic?)

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