It’s 2026 and after all these years it seems I will start a blog. Just when nobody does and nobody cares. That’s how I do things :shrug:. Previous post, Welcome to Senet, was written by my good new friend Claude Code, and I think it’s informative enough to let it be as is. AI is great to condense information and make it easy to read, so it’s just right for an initial “this is Senet” post.

I tried to do the same thing for this second post, but it turned out too impersonal, and that’s something I don’t want for Senet or for this blog. I tried a second run: “Claude, make it look more personal” and the result was so cringy that it convinced me I’d have to write my own stuff. (That said, it doesn’t mean this won’t go through a couple of AI passes to polish it out… so Claude, if you are reading this, don’t feel bad about the parts where I make fun of you).

Why Senet

I’m a gamer. Currently I almost don’t play any games, except for some casual mobile games when I’m at the toilet :unamused:. But I did play a lot of games in the past. I’m also a board game enthusiast. I like chess, and used to play over the board with my dad, my friends, and online later on some platforms.

Time passed and I ended up with less big-enough slots of time to enjoy a proper video game session or board game session. And it was even harder for two-player games (or more) where the big-enough slots of time not only have to exist, but have to coincide with your friends’. So I started enjoying gaming “in fractions”. That is, playing chess in correspondence mode, or playing some browser turn-based games.

I played VGA Planets on a 3-turns-per-week regime with friends. I played chess on a nice site called ChessAtWork (I believe it was a sibling site of Red Hot Pawn with a more sober UI). And that was great: I started three or four games with random strangers at a pace of 3 days per move, so every day I spent 15 minutes or so checking my games’ progress, making my moves, and closed the site until the next day. No rush, no pressure, just my 15-minute dose of gaming daily.

I also played slow-paced real-time games like Travian and some others. Those games were different flavors for the same feeling: the feel of “still being a gamer”. Same routine: give my troops orders when starting the day, and then forget about it until the next day.

Well, to be honest, for Travian and VGA Planets that’s not exactly true. When the game advances, the complexity increases and it takes a lot more time to manage troops, cities, or planets. It ends up consuming more than just 15 minutes daily. But still, those experiences had something I couldn’t get otherwise: multiplayer asynchronicity. I could make my moves, plan my strategy, and send my orders even if my friends or my random fellow players were sleeping, at work, or at a party. I had multiplayer without the requirement of spending the same slot of time with other gamers.

Around the same time, as a player on browser-based games, I noticed that no matter how good the UI the site provides, there will always be some nerd sub-community making scripts, plugins, or improvements for whatever site you are playing on. I remember quite complex Greasemonkey scripts for Travian and similar platforms that provided new or different functionality. So that’s a fact: in every internet niche, there are people with enough time, will, and knowledge to build useful stuff for themselves and others. My thought was: “these people’s energy should be channeled.”

Also, when playing chess on ChessAtWork, I lamented that there were no sites like that for other board games. There existed some fast-paced sites like Yahoo Games where you could play Connect Four or classic games, but they lacked the “slow-paced” modes and the catalog was limited.

And then I learned about chess variants: there are more than 2,000 of them and I’d have loved to try some. You can find certain variants on some gaming sites — you can play Chess960 on Lichess or Chess.com — but you probably won’t find any place to play Masonic Chess, or Atomic Chess, or Infinite Chess, or whatever strange chess variant you can think of. And that’s just chess. What about other games and their own variants?

And even invented games: I learned about Amazons, and besides having a friend over the board, there was no way I could try it. And in the rare case I ever found a site that had some strange game I wanted to try, what if I had a modification idea? Only chance: have a board, and a friend.

Eventually, about 10 years ago, I started putting all these ideas together:

• Lots of games out there
• Lots of gaming ideas and variants
• Not everyone has the same time slots to spend on them
• Huge community of people wanting to code
• Lots of board game enthusiasts

That’s the core of Senet. The site I would have liked to exist back then. In summary, it’s a community-driven platform where gamers play, discover, create, and discuss board games.

What’s here now

The platform is in a very early stage, but the core works (I’ll ask Claude to make this list, he does it better):

• 8 playable games — Tic-Tac-Toe, Hex, Stratego, Nine Men’s Morris, Quoridor, Quarto, Onitama, and Connect Four (with a 3D mode)
• Real-time multiplayer — invite a friend with a link, play as a guest or sign up, rules enforced by the engine
• Resign and draw — proper in-game actions for ending a match gracefully
• Game creation editor — write rules in TypeScript, build custom UIs and skins, upload assets (including JS libraries like Three.js), and test in the browser without losing your place
• Game variants — one-click “create your own version” of any published game
• Collaborative workflow — submit changes, get reviewed, iterate (like pull requests, but for games)
• Open source games — browse the source of any game, see how it works
• Forum and blog — for discussion, tutorials, and community content
• Comments on game pages — inline discussion on every game
• Edit your own posts — because typos happen and you should be able to fix them
• Theme system — color schemes, layout themes, immersive play mode, and a “System” option that follows your OS light/dark preference
• Admin dashboard — user management, project overview, submission queue
• About page — what Senet is, for newcomers who land on the site

What’s coming next

There’s a lot on the table to get to sooner than later (here too Claude, thanks):

• Player profiles — public pages with game history and created games
• Match history — see your past games, revisit completed matches
• Spectator mode — a proper “join as spectator” button. Today you can already watch a match by URL, but there’s no obvious entry point when the seats are full
• Notifications — know when someone replies or invites you to a match
• Game catalog search and filters — once the catalog grows past a handful of games, finding the one you want should be easy
• Ratings and rankings — track performance across games
• Tournaments and leagues — competitive events with brackets and standings
• Production hardening — proper CI/CD and a staging environment, so the platform doesn’t depend on me deploying straight from main on a Sunday afternoon
• Emoji support in posts — so this blog post will retroactively look 10% fancier :wink:
• Bots, way out there — game logic already runs in a sandboxed Deno process; the same sandbox could host automated opponents one day. Nothing built yet, but the door is open.

So far it’s a solo project, so be patient waiting for progress or new features. My hopes are that people with similar interests will join and collaborate. As long as I’m motivated, I’ll keep posting progress or ideas in this blog, to let you know what’s going on. I’m not sure how this will go — maybe technical posts, or tutorials, or design decisions… we’ll see. Things will also drift as we go — for instance, the previous post talks about “forking” games while this one says “variants”; that kind of renaming is going to happen as we figure out what fits.

If you kept reading until this point, it seems you are interested. Welcome — I hope we’ll build something awesome together, or at least have some great matches.

See ya!