Tiao, A two-player turn-based board game
Details
- External ID
- 47914369
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Tiao, A two-player turn-based board game
- Website domain
- playtiao.com
- Launched
- April 26, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 77
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8759640102827764
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hi HN,I built this digital version of Tiao, a two-player turn based strategy board game. Think Checkers meets Go. It's free, runs in the browser, has multiplayer, AI, over the board mode and a lot of other neat things. The source is on GitHub (AGPL).The game was originally designed by my friend Andreas Edmeier. He created the rules and has been playtesting and refining the game design for years. I built the website for it. The core in about 2 weeks using TypeScript, Next.js, Express, Websockets, and MongoDB. Fully dockerized, deployed on a Hetzner VPS with Coolify. Authentication with better-auth. Real-time gameplay, ELO matchmaking, OpenPanel analytics, and a fully functional achievements system.Play it: https://playtiao.com Source: https://github.com/trebeljahr/tiaoHappy to answer questions about the tech, the game design, or anything else.My hope is that more people will play this game because I think it is genuinely fun and would be cool to one day see people play this on a Go board or on their phones/computers.Have a good one.
Enrichment
- Theme
- AI agent games and chess tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- —
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- two-player turn-based board game
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes Turn-based 2D board games with standard web tech (React/Canvas), WebSockets for multiplayer matchmaking, and basic minimax/alphabeta bots are well-understood problems vibe coding excels at.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Bananagrams, Dobble, Magic Maze, Galaxy Trucker, Pendulum
Concerns raised: Unclear if move is legal until clicking (no pre-hover indication), No learner mode to undo moves after losing
Feature requests: Visual indication of illegal moves with less intense highlighting on hover, Undo/takeback move feature for learning
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 163 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #20 of 164 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 179 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Phive, a Gomoku-like game to play with friends or solo · hn · 2026-05-30 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Antimatter · hn · 2026-03-24 · 12 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.