OpenTafl has seen some major development work for the first time in a while, culminating in the recent release of v0.4.6.2b.

This version adds some major features which have been on my to-do list for some time. First, the in-game and replay board views now support keyboard input, a major usability enhancement. No longer will mistaken command entries torpedo your games!

That feature, however, was merely a happy piece of good fortune, falling out of the true headline feature for the v0.4.6.x releases: a variant editor. That’s right. OpenTafl is now the best tool available for designing tafl rules, bar none. Not only can you individually tweak every rule described in the OpenTafl notation specification, you can also edit the board layout to look any way you like.

If you’re interested in playing a few games with the new UI or experimenting with rules variants all your own, you can, as always, get the latest version from the OpenTafl website. I haven’t promoted v0.4.6.x to the stable release yet, but I expect to do so soon.

With these features done, I turn my attention next to a few network-centric things for v0.5.x. OpenTafl’s network play server has not, to date, seen much use; now that PlayTaflOnline.com is getting close to its new architecture, I hope to write a PlayTaflOnline front end for OpenTafl, so you can use OpenTafl to play games at PlayTaflOnline, with all the rich support for replays, commentary, and analysis from OpenTafl. OpenTafl’s network server mode and self-contained network play will continue to be a supported mechanism for remote games, but won’t see new features. v0.5.x will also contain an automatic updater, to simplify the end-user updating process.

Looking further into the future, I’m running out of OpenTafl features I want to do. With luck, 2017 will see a v1.0 release.