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Comment by dyeje | Hacker News Reader

Hi everyone, I’ve been working on this project on and off for quite a while. In my experience, it can be tedious to find a game of Dungeons & Dragons if you don’t have an existing network of friends who play it. You have to trawl various LFG forums which is time consuming and tedious. So I built Roleplayful to help automate that away. Users are able to do a detailed search (location, game, play style, and more), save the search, and then receive automatic email notifications when new matches appear for their search. Feedback welcomed and appreciated.

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Awesome project!

Why limit it to just role-playing games? I know that RPG players have to struggle quite a bit to find other players, but as a board-game player, I'd like to see some other dense games on here like Gloomhaven or maybe some trading card games like Magic: The Gathering.

Great question. I chose to focus on tabletop RPGs because I wanted to focus on a niche I was personally familiar with. I'm bullish on the future of the space and would love to build tooling for game masters if the site catches on. That said, if those games are something you're interested in using Roleplayful for, I would be happy to add them.

Oh yes, if you're going to expand on this, it would be great to include basically the range of games you typically see played at a local game store. This would span card games, board games, RPGs, and tabletop miniatures games. There's good resources out there for finding what titles are in demand. Boardgamegeek is a good one for board games, then for card games and miniatures games, any employee at a game store not called Games Workshop could give you the short list of titles to include!

I think board games are different from RPGs, though. Like, "Ticket to Ride" is a popular board game, but there isn't really a TtR community that's specifically looking for recurring sessions with other TtR players. It's more like there are board-game meetups that rotate through different games each time. (At least, that's been my experience at my FLGS.)

Games like Gloomhaven, which another poster mentioned, are a different ball game -- more like RPGs in that respect.

Diplomacy does have a large community

How do folks contribute to the list of game types? I went in looking for a blades in the dark campaign, and found it wasn’t a valid search term. I know it’s not as mainstream as d&d, but...

When you create a campaign, there is some help text letting you know that you can choose "Other" and email info@roleplayful.com to add the game. I will try to make it easier and more obvious. That said, I've gone ahead and added Blades in the Dark for you. I encourage you to add a campaign so the next person looking for Blades in the Dark can find you!

it's been a few years since I don't roleplay but (of course after covid) I think events like comicons work as great catalysts to get people together in this space, and maybe you can explore this. there's also platforms like d20 and tabletop nowadays, which may represent a market to you. good luck and have the resilience because in a niche like this even going viral takes sometimes much more time than people expect

Definitely! I'm looking into sponsoring content creators and events like Gen Con.

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