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Comment by adrian_saito | Hacker News Reader

Blockchain is an ideal way to free physical board game makers from the constraints of manufacturing and big-brand contract conditions.

Here at Saito we have released an online Arcade powered by the Saito Game Engine (SaGE) — a fully distributed, fully on-chain platform, currently featuring classics such as Chess, WordBlocks, and Twilight Struggle as examples of what can be done.

All games run directly in a browser and communicate using Saito’s blockchain as a peer-to-peer network.

Would love to connect with anyone interested in developing on our platform, or those open to discussing the use and ideas of blockchain tech more generally.

Thanks for your time, and any feedback or thoughts you can share.

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Not trying to be a jerk, these are all serious questions and I am thankful for insights, because I seem to be blind to the benefits of blockchains in that regard.

How is a Blockchain better here than just a SQL database? How is it the blockchain exactly that frees you from 'the constraints of manufacturing' a physical board? How is playing chess on your platform any improvement over playing it on lichess, chess.com or chess24? Why would a developer of a game want immutable and distributed data?

Not OP, but I could see the fun and value in an immutable and distributed record of a board game. Cheating would be very hard, and I imagine a passionate player feels good knowing the platform will exist for as long as there are players, and about having an eternal record of all of their games ever. Pro leagues can refer back to the chain for scores and arbitrage, customized game clients can hook up to the chain (perhaps tagged with a hash of the client so players can agree on subgenres of 'legal' clients), players can easily pick up and play any game in history from any state..

I don't know about being 'freed from the constraints of manufacturing'.. But a game on a blockchain might be one of the few uses of blockchain I can think of that actually sounds useful.

How is a blockchain a practical way to ensure no cheating? Why not just write software that doesn't let you cheat? Or referees....

Speculating here... A game with rules encoded in a blockchain is transparent, and publishing rules clarifications is also transparent. You could play on a game in the blockchain, have everyone's moves be encoded on the blockchain, and never have to trust a server wad cheating. A few year's back, UltimateBet.net, a poker site, was caught rigging the poker games being played. [1] Even if UltimateBet.net had open sourced all of their software, one wouldn't be able to trust their servers were actually running that software. With a game on the blockchain, there is no server to trust.

[1] https://upswingpoker.com/ultimate-bet-absolute-poker-scandal...

From your link:

> The cheaters relied on a superuser account named “Auditmonster2,” that would observe tables and was able to see everyone player’s hole cards.

So.. the game was played exactly by the rules, and the full visibility would not have helped. After all, it was purely info exposure.

But you may say: in blockchain, we'd design special cryptosystem that will ensure other players do know know cards too early, as well as a verify that game is played according to the rules

My answer would be that if you have designed such a cryptosystem, you don't need blockchain anymore! Keep existing infrastructure, but apply encryption and verification at each client. After all, you do not care about world consensus for your poker game -- you just care about consensus between players. You will get all the advantages of centralized solution (high speed, very scaleable, low device requirements, easy upgrades), and server won't be able to rig the games.

It gives you an immutable record of what happened, which becomes more useful as anti-cheating measures improve

Blockchain is that software that doesn't let anyone cheat in a P2P architecture. If you have another option please tell.

> …I could see the fun and value in an immutable and distributed record of a board game.

Blockchains are mutation-resistant, but not immutable. For example, here's the cost of performing one-hour "51% attack" on various PoW-based blockchains: https://www.crypto51.app/

Because of the relatively small audience that would dedicate their computers to running this vendor's blockchain 24/7, the cost of brute-force attacking this game's blockchain would likely be much lower than any of those. That assumes the software running on each node was unhackable, which would potentially make it much easier to alter or destroy.

> Cheating would be very hard…

At best, a distributed solution doesn't make cheating more difficult. Depending on how it's implemented, a distributed solution can make cheating and other abuse much easier (the idea of community managers banning bad actors isn't a thing, etc.).

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