I’ve been thinking how I want to expand BoardingList and what things I want to add, what can be improved and what direction I want to head.
Now the app is completely, free, it only works for the iPhone. In order for it to endure, it needs to be self sustaining. It needs to at least cover its cost. Now I could charge for the app, but I don’t think that is a valid option, the main reason for me, is I don’t believe in the Codex tax. I don’t think GW should be charging for books, as it limits your spend on more profitable plastic. Arguably digital products are more profitable than plastic but I think focusing on increasing plastic spend is a better endeavour. So with that in mind, my direction is focused target affiliate links, which is more work than traditional ads.
You can see an attempt this on Legiones Daemonica list, where I have linked each unit to the units product page on Wayland Games. This does however create more work as each product needs a unique link creating which is time consuming. However, this is more upfront labour and should at least remain working and providing random passive income for the future.
Annoyingly, there doesn’t seem to be a common way to send a list of ideas, a basket, to a online store, so you can’t do a one-click, buy this army button
The more observate folks can see I added barcode scanning, admittedly this is mostly due to working for a RFID software company and the GW products are a great way to explain how RFID can be used for higher end goods, for example auditing regional restrictions. GW for example doesn’t allow third parties, such as Wayland Games, to sell their products to certain regions. I assume this is due to regional pricing, taxes, exchange rates etc. Being able to trace a product history not only allows these sorts of compliance checks, but also environmental insights, such as transportation costs like how much CO2 did it take to get your little plastic models to you. This is all possible with RFID that uses wireless scanning of the tag, so it can be easily scan as it moves through the supply chain, that is encoded with both the product identifier (GS1 GTIN barcode) and a unique serial number.
This does then highlight the next problem, if Wayland Games is only UK, what about the US or Europe or the rest of the world? It means replicating that effort. Cloudflare does offer options to redirects based on the end users location. So it’s a solved problem, it’s just effort.
The boarding action list library does haven the ability for painters to provide lists of paints and accessories they used to build and paint the army list, so it has a social aspect that allows the community to share ideas and share in the profits. This would be really useful if we had that standard basket, one-click add the entire list to the basket.
So there is potential. It’s just it’s going to require effort. The effort is only going to be useful if the app/lists gets the numbers in terms of users.
Some of the obvious problems just in terms of promotion/getting the name out their are:
- Bad naming - searching for anything Boarding on the app stores gives you a mountain of airliners apps and other airport related apps. I had originally picked “Servo-Skull” but changed my mined due to possible copyright/trademark issues (looking at you GW)
- Poor SEO - I know there is lot of things I can do to improve this, its not my skill set but there are some “easy wins”
- Poor social media - I just suck at posting on social media.
- Poor community ties - similar to social media, I tend to consume rather than publish and realistically this isn’t something I’m gonna be able to do, its going to be finding a partner(s) who are established within the community. In an ideal world, sponsoring a few Boarding Actions tournaments.
The main tech problem is the lack of device support. I do want to also do an iPad version, moving the buttons to left hand menus to take advantage of the larger display. Building just for iPhone makes the development and testing a lot easier, however the iPhone isn’t as popular outside of the US as it is in the US. Most people have android devices. This is less about porting and more about a whole rewrite, which sounds horrid until you think the entire app was mostly written using Claude AI. The biggest issue will be testing. The device screen sizes vary so much. With iPhone you are limited to really a few options and you can pretty much guarantee almost all users will be on the latest version, unlike Android.
I’ve also experimented with a Raspberry PI with the AI camera. I was originally hoping to find some existing tool or product that allowed be display the map with some cool animations, like when the hatchway opens or such, but no such luck. I did discover that the boarding actions map is the same side as a 55” TV which did nearly prompted me to go out and spend a few hundred Great British Pounds getting a cheap 2nd TV.
I couldn’t find a cheap way to cover the TV to protect the screen so models could be placed on top. In terms of mounting it I found lot of people just box in the TV and place it on top of the table, I’m kinda growing on this idea vs the expensive building a table around it.
Terms of the camera, I found it worked fairly well reading the dice results, it got a bit more confused when you rolled a ton of dice - something that wouldn’t be a good for horde armies, especially in standard 2,000 point games. There are also lot of others who have done this already, the problem with this is unfortunately the wide array of dice available and the possible need to retrain the model for each new type. Although you could limit your games to approved dice, I don’t think this is something I would recommend, especially as GW is selling army theme dice.
Terms of tracking the game, it seems to be possible, again, testing against different models and backgrounds would be needed, however with the board being dynamic on the TV you could have it quickly change to a high contrast colour to help detect the models position. I do wonder how the iPhone LIDAR would fair.
The initial setup would require placing the units into pre-setup boxes then defining them in some sort of app so you could marry up the unit with the visual the camera observed. I don’t see this as a problem as most people unpack their units onto the table pre-game so deployment is more straight forward. The deployment and movement is per unit, so tracking shouldn’t too tricky.
This does allow is no physical terrain, so setup time can be reduce between switching games, distances can be visually show and impairments and enhances included in the calculation (closed doors, advance charge) - so this model can move anywhere in the highlighted area.
The other possible benefit could be line of sight, you might however want “what-if”. After all it’s not much point hiding if the enemy can just move forward then see you. This is admittedly lot of the strategy of the game, so it would just likely be a basic, you can move here, maybe with a different colour for “if you advance” in some sort of 1” layers. And some basic sort of line of sight options.
Tracking the original models exact location would also be a great thing to have, how often have you been in a public place, like your local game store and someone randomly picks up your model and places it back in a random location, meaning you end up losing the actual location of the model.
Elements like wounds on models can be visually show on the table, with the data inputted via a tablet. Turning the list builder into a battle records would mean collecting more information and replicating what other apps have already done, which might tie in the previously mentioned partnering, however more data would likely required to be tracked. It does however mean battle reports could be easily outputted, bringing back the old school White Dwarf battle reports
AI could be used to help generate text summaries for example. There is a lot of data could be digitalised depending on the effort put in.
So yeah, not sure if I wanted to make a digital boarding actions, I would need to figure out how I’d do that. Would I go down the Raspberry Pi route and mount a camera to pole that hangs over the table (thinking like a clothing rail), would I have multi cameras to track the dice rolls? Would each player have a dice tray - so 3 cameras? Would I have a live stream/record option?
Would I stick with the Apple ecosystem, so basically have a iPhone mounted above the table, or would I look at the Apple Vision Pro?
Lots of options and ideas, the biggest blocker of all is GW. It’s not even if they did their own version of these ideas, if anything that would be ideal, means I wouldn’t have to build it, or even if I did build it and mine was better, I would mean I’d at least they wouldn’t do my worse fear, killing off Boarding Actions. This is after all, basically Space Hulk which has died a few times already in GW history. The unfortunate truth is Boarding Actions isn’t as popular as the standard 2,000 point battle. For the digital table to work, it would require it to be a premium option selling for in the thousands of pounds for a few people. The Vision Pro version could be a cheaper app option but I can’t seeing that being an option for a long time, assuming Apple doesn’t kill it off before they hit the Meta Ray Ban price point and size.