Button Men Online

Button Men Online is a fan-maintained website, sanctioned by James Ernest, that allows for online play of the game. The current website is at http://www.buttonweavers.com .

Current Implementation

User BlackShadowShade, an Australian user of Huyler's BMO site, suggested rebooting the site November 12, 2012. Users Brooks, Chaos, and Evan join the development team, creating the site's Github repository on November 29th. As issues are added, users Jota and Fog join as Brooks and Evan leave the project.On November 1st, 2013, http://www.buttonweavers.com opened for public testing.

History

Dana Huyler's Button Men Online

Here is Dana's words on the site itself.

"It was mostly me, sometimes one other coder (Loren Peace).

For many people, The buttonmen website was a community to socialize. It was a nice place to play something and talk. The ability to communicate via the “taunts” and to re-challenge and continue to conversation really made the site explode. I mostly did any image editing if possible. Also, I spend a bunch of time adding fun things here and there to keep the site fresh. Easter egg hunts, Olympics, trivia, site wide competitions, tournaments....

All based on a simple dice game.

I met hundreds of people from the site, a good 60 or so I still communicate with, and I didn’t charge anything, paying for the site out of my own pocket.

BMO was coded in Perl using modperl and apache 1.0. As I got more sets or buttons I just added them to the end of the "button recipe" file, the button recipes were the primary grouping file; the flavor groupings didn’t matter. The forum was hosted in an entirely different system and I don't have a good backup from that time; the forum backup is a binary mess of crap I can’t decode.

I had support for tournaments for a while. I had nearly 1300 tournaments in 2001.

The machine died, and the backup tapes were rotated out where we had the machine. The hard drive was toast completely frozen. When we accessed the backups, our data wasn’t there. Most of my backups were in bad shape and I only have Data from a few different checkpoints (2001 was the most complete yet found). I would like to find a valid backup from 2007 or later."

Here is a detailed history of the site according to the site itself, circa 2004: "A short history on the site (and it's five incarnations):

I (Skeeve) had played BM before a few times and I knew that it was an 'easy' game to program, so after reading about on the Cheapass Listserv I decided to write a program that played BM so that I could play with Loren over the net. I got a list of all the BM from a site and started coding the game. I got some of the BM working and got it on line (Version 1 went live Sep 29th 2000) and played a bit with Loren.
Version 1 only had Trip, Shadow, Speed, and Poison dice. You could pass anytime, could not log in, and could not make games.
I announced version 2 on Oct 23 2000 on the listserv.
I added new code and fixed logins, and game creation. Chance,Focus,Reserve and Time/Space Dice didn't work.
On Oct 31st, I moved it to a new location, and added more code to the game.
On November 6th, Flipside.com annouced their licensed version of BM, and was asked to shut down the site by Flipside.com. On Nov 7th, the Site was shutdown. Unfortuntely, I undercut flipside.com by a few weeks, and a HUGE discussion/fight was conducted on the listserv. You can see it in November 2000 on the listserv.
Version 3 lasted for a short while, as I added more functionality. Loren and I were playing the game, as the site was shut down.
Version 4 lasted longer as I had a few playesters (pandabo, zaph, Stick, Anvil) hammering on the code.
Version 5, the current version, went active in Feburary 2001 and was the BIG rewrite as all non-game code was merged with Loren Peace's Shadow system. Hordes of new features was added. I brought my site back up so people could play again, and invited all the old players into the system. I decided not to advertise at all on my own, instead just letting the game grow via word of mouth.

The game has grown into what you see now. It's been a fun ride."

Other Digital Implementations

Tabletop Simulator

Tabletop Simulator versions of Button Men are available via Steam.

• Button Men (2018) includes the cards from Fight City set.
• ButtonMen includes 48 Button Men mostly from the Button Men Originals reprint.
• Button Men includes the Soldiers set.

Button Men: Second Life

A manual-to-play version of Button Men is available in the online hub Second Life. All recipes are supported, but all rules and play are controlled by the players, much like Real Life Button Men. More information can be found at the developer's site.

Artificial Intelligence Implementations

There have been at least three artificial intelligences created to interface with Button Men Online, two of which were made known to be artificial intelligences.

BMAI

According to Denis Papp:

"BMAI development began in 2001. The fundamental concept was based on my experience developing a poker AI named Loki to play online against human opponents via IRC for while at the University of Alberta (https://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/). Like BMAI, the AI was written in C++ and the interface for the website (or IRC) was written in Perl. This provided a rich testbed for playing a significant number of games against real opponents.

I discovered the unofficial Buttonmen website created by Dana Huyler as a player. I thought that an AI based on Monte Carlo simulations and maximizing expected value would do quite well, much like with poker, and a fun project. The availability of the website with straightforward structured input and output would provide a rich sandbox for development and testing.
The BMAI finished it's first game on March 27, 2001, and it's last game on February 26, 2012.

It completed 11,627 games. The end date may coincide with when the website went down, or when the "protocol" changed and I stopped updating it. A note I found from 2008 looks like it had a win rate of 60.85% at that time."

Nala

Nala is the current AI implemented to play on Button Men Online .

Nala has an additional feature which allows the bot to chat with other users, often with entertaining results. Nala is maintained by Jota.