Introduction
Je Di Bo is a turn-based PvP strategy at the crossroads of chess, board games and card randomness. It is planned to become a mini-game inside Atomic Heart 2. Tactics, strategy, a 12×12 board, up to five actions per turn and Karma that regularly breaks the plan — yours and your opponent’s alike. We developed the MVP on a tight schedule — it was intense, but exciting.
Je Di Bo feels like chess plus a card board game: players move pieces across a 12×12 board, plan series of moves, raise the ranks of their pieces and try to wipe out the opponent’s army completely. Sounds simple: move, strike, win. But there’s a catch — Karma.
Game Features
Tactics and Strategy
Deep turn-based gameplay: in a single turn a player makes up to five actions with different pieces. But if you capture an opponent’s piece, the series of moves stops. So it matters not only “where to move”, but also “when to strike” and with which piece. Sometimes the best strike is the last one in a series, and sometimes the first.
Karma That Changes Everything
Every seventh turn, circumstance cards — game-changers — step into the match. One card comes to you, the other to your opponent, and everything can change twice in a single turn. You have to think ahead, but getting too attached to a perfect plan is dangerous.
PvP and Playing Against a Bot
You can play against another player or against a bot. The bot is smart enough to make the game interesting, but not so smart that it always wins.
Screenshots
Building the MVP — a Developer’s View
We were asked to make a digital version of the Je Di Bo board game in an MVP format. An MVP is a complete product you can hand to players and get objective feedback from them. In other words, the goal wasn’t a “pretty picture of the board” or a documentation package, but a fully playable game — and that’s what we built.
The process was intense because of the tight deadlines: the game logic is varied and tightly coupled, with a lot of nuances and states under the hood. The most interesting directions of development:
- Rules and core gameplay. A tactical and strategic game: lots of rules, special cases, behavior types and system states — a hardcore genre to develop.
- PvP mode. Multiplayer always significantly complicates the technical side. A game with networked play can be 2–5 times harder: longer, more expensive, higher risk, more bugs.
- UI and UX. In tactical games the interface is part of the core gameplay. The player must understand the consequences of every action in advance — that’s the essence of the genre. To make it work, you have to design and polish dozens of mechanics and effects.
- Game-changers (Karma cards). Each one strongly changes the game’s state — which means a separate implementation and round of testing. Example: the “Field Swap” card swaps the players’ sides. In a board game it’s simple — just switch chairs. In a networked video game, a single game-changer means handling a pile of nuances, and there are twenty of them.
- Playing against a bot. Teaching the bot the basic rules is easy; teaching it to use game-changers properly and react to them is a separate challenge.
The main challenge in projects like this is correctly translating board-game mechanics into digital logic. A board game forgives a lot: players agree among themselves, nudge a piece, interpret a rule their own way and keep going. A digital version can’t do that: the system either understands a rule and manages it, or it breaks the match. So we carefully broke the mechanics down into atoms — rules, states, checks, constraints, combinations, synergies and exceptions — and rebuilt the digital version from them while preserving the gameplay and all its quirks. A great experience for anyone who loves games and enjoys assembling mechanics atom by atom over months.
Je Di Bo Rules
There are three types of pieces in the game — not just shapes, but ranks:
- Triangle — the simplest. Moves one square forward and never backward.
- Square — the mid-tier. Moves and attacks forward, sideways and diagonally up to three squares.
- Circle — the strongest, all-purpose piece. Moves and strikes in any direction, including backward, up to five squares.
The higher the rank, the more options for movement and attack. The goal of the match is to completely destroy the opponent’s pieces.
Karma — the Heart of Je Di Bo
Karma is a set of circumstance cards (game-changers) that step into the match every seventh turn. They can help, hinder, move pieces around, grant new options or break a careful plan. The rules include cards like “Jumper”, “Fresh Blood”, “Spy”, “Blitzkrieg”, “Immortality”, “Death Line”, “Field Swap”, “Betrayal” and others.
This is exactly where Je Di Bo stops being just a “chess puzzle”. In chess you build a plan and try to carry it out. In Je Di Bo you build a plan, then Karma arrives — and you have to come up with a new one. If you like tactical turn-based games, give Je Di Bo a try. It’s not Into the Breach and it’s not The Last Spell, but it isn’t chess either — the game has its own tactical charm.
Custom Game Development by Our Studio
Our team professionally provides custom game development — and we especially enjoy complex tactical projects and bringing board games into the digital world:
- Board-to-digital adaptation: we’ll break the mechanics down into atoms — rules, states, checks, exceptions — and assemble a correct digital version.
- Turnkey development: game design, art, game logic, a PvP mode, a bot and a build for the chosen platform.
- Any format: browser, PC, mobile devices or a mini-game inside a larger project.