Messages

1

Happy Meeple community / Re: Bad news - Good news

« on: 22/11/24, 11:16pm »

Please note.
After the platform closure, the website happymeeple.com will display for a while the text published her.
So if you forgot the Board Game Arena link, you should be able to find it by visiting happymeeple.com again.

2

Happy Meeple community / Re: Bad news - Good news

« on: 22/11/24, 11:10pm »

i will finish on positive note : it has always a pleasure ton play on happy meeple. it's cute, people are nice, the meta game is a good idea (game within the game : build a village to produce food to be able to play : wow), the training mode is perfect.

if BGA editors can steal some idea and implement in their platform , would be great. if BGA is a factory or an industry, happy meeple was that local shop you are attached to.

I like your final word very much. Great touch!!! Many thanks for that! I'll keep that with me for sure.

3

Happy Meeple community / Re: Bad news - Good news

« on: 22/11/24, 12:01pm »

I am sorry that so many of you are angry at me for not letting you know about the situation ahead of time. Of course, that was an option I considered. I honestly think that there was very little chance that a viable solution could come up. The problem was not only a problem of money, it was also a complex technical problem.

Many of you compare BGA and Happy Meeple, saying HM was more cozy, etc. Of course, that's what you think as many of you decided to go to HM rather than BGA. Over the years though, I heard quite a few (honest) people tell me that HM felt outdated (like a website from 2000). Not being a design guy, I failed to understand what was exactly wrong and how to correct it but I was pretty certain that they were right. It was probably simple things like shadows and rounded corners, or the font. But I never really delved into the issue.

Regarding BGA criticism, I think you are being too harsh. I created a test account a few days ago and was quite impressed with the way they were explaining new players what the options were and what they exactly meant. I think they did a fantastic job on that. I have also played quite a few games on BGA myself and was also impressed with many of their tutorials. To be honest, I was always proud of my tutorials here and felt a bit disappointed that they had managed to do a good job at that too. For a long time, HM was the only platform with tutorials. People who really know the game and love it decide to take on the task of designing these tutorials and that's probably why they are so good. I should add that in the last few years, it is noticeable that they hired designers. The last iteration of the platform is really neat and is a noticeable improvement on the previous years, and even on last year.

BGA offers many more options than HM. We always kept things standardised here, not offering any game variant for example. BGA lets you play with more than 2 players. It also offers asynchronous (turn by turn) play which is a more relaxed way of playing (for example, one move per day) than real-time play. They offer game variants. Most importantly they let you play blockbusters like Ticket To Ride or Catan.

So please be patient with BGA, they have a lot to offer. And the interface is not as daunting as it may seem especially after they improved it so much.

Finally, let me suggest you a few games that Happy Meeple players may particularly like. Most are quick-playing:
 
- Ticket To Ride (a must)
- Can't Stop (Push your luck that I should have put on HM but stupidly discarded)
- On Tour (another contender for HM)
- Patchwork (best-seller)
- Welcome (best-seller, Flip and Write, excellent)
- Splendor (best-seller, engine building)
- Chakra (could have been on HM)
- Azul (best-seller)
- Forest Shuffle (excellent but a slightly more complex)
- Sea Salt & Paper
- Lucky Numbers (simple like Finito)
- Kingdomino (best-seller, simple rules)
- Faraway (new and good, award-winning, quick engine-building)
- Akropolis (award-winning)
- Jaipur (quite good, mid complexity)
- Century spice road (quick engine-building)
- Diamant (oldie but goodie, good with many people)

I will update this list as new suggestions come up.

4

Happy Meeple community / Re: Bad news - Good news

« on: 22/11/24, 11:03am »

I 

Edit: Oops, I did not want this to be posted as is. 

5

Happy Meeple community / Re: Bad news - Good news

« on: 21/11/24, 11:36pm »

Thanks for your nice words. It goes to my heart.

To answer some of your questions:

1) The association with the group "Happy Meeple Players" is not done 100% automatically. Someone has to run a script for that to happen and they planned to do it from time to time. I have asked (a bit late) if they could automate it, like every 10 minutes or 1 hour. I am still waiting for an answer. I don't see why it could not be done. So hopefully, it will work better soon.
You can also join it directly here: https://boardgamearena.com/group?id=17167668

2) Level X is known as "Mountain Goats" on Board Game Arena. That's its new name. Same rules I think but different layout/theme. And you can play with more players on Board Game Arena.

3) Yes I am French 

4) You can discuss things in the BGA group. Maybe that's the best place to coordinate an action to ask the platform to develop a game you love. Their process, as far as I know, is to get a license first, and then ask if one of their (voluntary) developer is interested in coding the game.

6

Happy Meeple community / Bad news - Good news

« on: 21/11/24, 04:42pm »

The bad news
I am very sad to let you know that Happy Meeple will be closing in mid-december.
The platform was launched in March 2012 with the idea of bringing simple yet interesting board games to the mass market.
I carefully selected 13 games, wrote tutorials to make it easy to start playing and added Artificial Intelligence to play even when no human opponents were available. This, I hoped, were the keys to success.
Unfortunately, while the whole endeavour has not been a total failure (7 million games were played over the years and about 500 players were playing daily), it was not enough of a success to balance the books and certainly not to pay a salary.
In the last two years, I have dedicated less and less time to the platform. As a result, it has become more and more difficult to maintain. We had issues with our email servers. We were running low on hard disk storage. And finally the technology behind the gaming server was outdated and needed a rewrite that I never finished.
It was getting harder and harder to get it going. And regretfully, it is now time to pull the curtains.
I am sure that you are disappointed but there is hope… You can keep playing.

The good news
Our most popular games (Lost cities, Cartographers, Hanamikoji and Level X) are available on another platform called “Board Game Arena” and they have agreed on a special offer for Happy Meeple players.
The offer is twofold:
1) All Happy Meeple players that will create an account on Board Game Arena will join a “Happy Meeple players” group. I insisted on this feature and hope that it will make it easy for you to find your old friends. I suggest that you use the same nickname as on Happy Meeple if possible.
2) Like Happy Meeple, Board Game Arena does not require a subscription to play, it is a free platform. However, I strongly recommend that you become a subscriber as it has many benefits and is very affordable. If you subscribe (one month or more), Board Game Arena will give you one extra month for free.
Please note the important information below:
-   If you don’t have an account with Board Game Arena:
you must use the link below to create an account and then you need to use it again when you want to proceed with the subscription and benefit from the offer.
-   If you already have an account with Board Game Arena:
if you have not been a premium member in the last 30 days, you can also benefit from the offer. First login to Board Game Arena, then click on the link below and proceed with the subscription.

Click here to get the benefits of the Board Game Arena offer

The link will work for one year until 20/11/2025.

Thanks
I wish to thank all the persons that I worked with, in particular the publishers and game designers that trusted me with their games and the illustrators and translators that made it all so friendly. I don't want to forget the admins that helped moderate the platform. And of course, you the players! The vast majority of Happy Meeple players were very nice and fair-play.
May the Happy Meeple spirit live long on Board Game Arena.

Final words
Happy Meeple has been a fun ride for me. I hope to see you again on Board Game Arena soon. Feel free to get in touch with me there if you have any question or want to play a game.

Nicolas Guibert.
Roitelet (on Board Game Arena)

7

Tips, polls, updates / Re: I Can't See Any Games

« on: 07/11/23, 09:48am »

I have just put another fix to delete some cookies that was messing up with the platform. Hopefully, this will sort it for all.

@Carolyn, let me know if it works now and if not, the exact message you receive. You seem to be running into something I have not seen.

8

Tips, polls, updates / Re: I Can't See Any Games

« on: 05/11/23, 03:19pm »

I made changes to the platform to fix the Chrome issue. The good news is that it does work on my machine now.

However, it looks like it will probably not work on yours just yet. Please try and let me know!

If it does not work, then please try again after closing all instances of Chrome, this might definitely help. Unfortunately, I have just tried on another machine where none of it helped

Please do the above and let me know what happens, whether it is positive or negative!

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Tips, polls, updates / Re: I Can't See Any Games

« on: 19/09/23, 11:34am »

Please read this thread. Your best bet for now is to use another browser.

https://www.happymeeple.com/forum/index.php?topic=587.msg2944;topicseen#new

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Tips, polls, updates / Re: Chrome issues

« on: 21/08/23, 06:12pm »

The issue is indeed with Chrome and the affected users get the following Javascript error:

Uncaught SecurityError: Blocked a frame with origin "https://www.happymeeple.com" from accessing a cross-origin frame.

This prevents the page to connect to our gaming server.

The message basically says that it does not allow the page to interact with an address that is not related to happymeeple.com. That is clearly not the case though. Our code has not been hacked. And our gaming server should be allowed.

I have no idea what is going wrong as I don't have the issue on my machine.

It might help if someone with the error opened the developer window (F12) and maybe find something useful there. I suspect there might be something in red somewhere to indicate a problem or maybe a warning somewhere in the console text. I can't see much on my end from the logs we receive.

In any case Chrome probably launched an update around the 6th of August leading to the error (added security?).

11

Happy Meeple community / Re: Server down?

« on: 24/10/22, 10:24am »

Back to normal. Sorry for the inconvenience!

12

Happy Meeple community / Re: Why am I banned?

« on: 13/07/22, 09:48am »

If you are the person I am thinking of, I have indeed written to you (wrong email).

Can you please write to us with your previous email and your new email so that we can make the change to your account and send you the relevant information.

13

Happy Meeple community / Re: Disconnects are infuriating

« on: 26/05/22, 10:15am »

Pam,

I can certainly understand your frustration. It is very very annoying to lose a game because of a connection issue.

We have spent a lot of time trying to understand what is going on. We never noticed any clear reason during our many investigations.

We also wrote quite a few lines of code to try and improve what we thought could potentially go wrong. But nothing ever changed the stats.

The biggest improvement we did was to give the possibility to refresh the page. The game is then reloaded and usually the game can keep going then. However, even this major improvement did not seem to make much difference. The rate of abandonned/unfinished online games stays around 2.5%/3%. It seems to be the absolute bottom for now.

What you should know is that the game server has a session of 45 seconds. This means that you get disconnected from the gaming server after that time. The website sessions last much longer but for technical reasons related to the technology used, the gaming server has a shorter session length of 45 seconds. In practice, this means that after 45 seconds, the gaming server considers you gone and the game lost. For that reason, if you refresh the game page after 45s of disconnection, you will be redirected to the home page. I would therefore strongly advise you to refresh the page as soon as you suspect that something is not quite right.

We have started to work on a new gaming server with a more recent technology. We hope that this will make a difference. It is very likely that the current technology does not handle disconnection/reconnection very well. Unfortunately, that's out of our hands.

Happy gaming!

14

Tips, polls, updates / Re: List of updates

« on: 02/03/22, 06:15pm »

2022/03/02 Facebook share button

Sharing a news or a link on Facebook was not working anymore. It is now fixed.

15

Happy Meeple community / Support for those who suffer

« on: 27/02/22, 06:18pm »

Behind the horrible situation in Ukraine, it is democracy and freedom that is under attack.

We would like to express our support and solidarity for the Ukrainian people who suffer from the atrocious attack on their country. Ukrainian people are needlessly dying right now. It is feared that the situation may escalate further in the coming days, the fierce resistance of Ukraine possibly leading the Russian dictator to even more atrocities (which unfortunately he has proven many times to be capable of).

We sincerely hope that the situation will be resolved as soon as possible.

We would also like to express our support for the Russian people who suffer from an odious government. They cannot demonstrate against war (they are put in jail by police). They cannot know the truth (Facebook and Twitter are now closed in Russia and lying state media are not even permitted to use the word war). They cannot vote for opposition parties as these are harassed (and their leader poisoned). The money generated by the economy is stolen by a few. The Russian people already suffer now and will soon suffer more heavily from the war (thousands of young Russian soldiers already died sent as cannon fodder and economic sanctions will hurt the poorest the most with the currency, the Ruble soon worth very little).

At Happy Meeple, we value respect between citizens of the world more than anything else.

We sincerely hope that the free world will prevail over a few mad men.