Exploiting traditional gameplay characteristics to enhance digital board games

Computer enhanced board and card games constitute a highly engaging and entertaining activity as attested by their widespread popularity and the large amount of dedicated players. Nonetheless, when considering these digital counterparts of traditional board games it becomes evident that certain features of the latter, such as the flexibility of games and the inherent social interactions that regard the player as an active participant and not merely as the end-user of a product, have been in general neglected. In particular, the ability to customize and adapt games according to the players´ needs is one of the key factors of their success and should thus not be ignored when porting them to the digital environment. In this paper we present our work on a holistic framework titled FlexibleRules that addresses these limitations by bringing the intrinsic flexibility of board games played in the traditional environment into the digital one, while additionally aiming to increase the level of involvement of end-users, the players, with basic programing skills, in the game development process. A multi-faceted user evaluation study validates the effectiveness of our approach and provides encouraging results for further research.