I have loved playing VASSAL for years, it was actually my gateway into ASL, Space Empires and others. However I am now quite time-poor and travel frequently. I want to play wargames on the go, but my main hardware consists of iOS devices.
I tried setting up UTM and virtual machines on my iPad/iPhone, but that is nearly impossible without jailbreaking. Onboard wifi is not always standard (and not even at high speeds) and remote areas don’t allow me to reliably remote into a desktop, and I don’t want to lump an extra mini PC around. Frustratingly those exact offline transit hours are the prime downtime I want to use for gaming.
Suffice to say this desire + the Fable 5 allowance frenzy in the last few days has led me to hack together a self-hostable, local, iOS friendly, browser-based Vassal emulator. It runs locally in the browser and can:
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Import standard modules and parse various elements (tested on grand total of 3 games so far).
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Displays a fast counter browser for chits and game elements.
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Handle pop-up game aids and right-click context menus, and one module has a mini-map.
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Import and export compatible .vsav game files (currently limited for VASL itself).
It is admittedly very rough around the edges and heavily vibe-coded, BUT it is finally starting to become functional. I know Android benefits from the linux desktop and explained in docs, but cleary this would work on Android/any JVM-less potato as well.
Before I sink more time into polishing it / becomes possible to publicise a repo, I wanted to test the waters: is this something the community would be interested in trying or helping to test? I would love to hear your thoughts!
PS: This litteraly comes at the same time as DrEvil’s prototype which is a completely separate topic about (this is just a replacement for the Vassal JVM UI, using AI to code - not play) - and I loved Midwinter as a kid!
Sent from my iPad:
