Persist accepted moves in a durable, ordered log, and let the server—not any player’s device—decide which moves are legal and what state comes next. Give every committed transition a sequence number so reconnecting clients can resume from a known version; use snapshots when rebuilding from the log takes too long for the game’s needs.
Make the server authoritative for every move
A client should send an intent such as PlayCard, MovePiece or EndTurn, not declare the new canonical game state. The server loads the current state, checks the game and player, validates the move against the rules, computes the next state, and commits the accepted transition. The boardgame.io multiplayer documentation describes an authoritative game master that computes state before broadcasting it. In its chess example, Unity’s Cloud Code documentation likewise checks the turn and move on the server before saving the updated state.
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Define a command boundary
A command is a request to attempt an action; it is not yet an event in the game’s history. Include enough context to identify the game and authenticated player or seat, along with a command identifier or idempotency key when delivery might be retried. These are practical design choices, not a universal schema prescribed by the cited frameworks.
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- Authenticate the caller and resolve the seat they control.
- Load the game’s authoritative state and check that it is still accepting moves.
- Check whose turn it is and whether the requested action is legal in that state.
- If valid, compute the next state and persist the accepted transition with its next sequence number as one serialized operation.
- Return or broadcast the resulting version and the caller’s permitted view of it. Reject invalid actions without adding them to the accepted history.
Serialize updates per game, or use a database transaction or equivalent concurrency control, so two requests cannot both be accepted against the same old turn. The exact transaction guarantees depend on the storage system; choose and verify them for the deployment rather than assuming a backend provides the needed boundary.
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Persist accepted transitions so a game can be rebuilt
Store accepted actions in a stable order and make state reconstructible by applying them through the game’s transition logic. The EigenInteractive engine overview describes state as a deterministic function of a base seed and an ordered, immutable action log. The key property is that the same starting conditions and accepted history produce the same state.
Record enough to interpret each event
A practical event record commonly includes:
- Game ID and monotonically increasing sequence number.
- Event type and validated payload describing what was accepted.
- Actor or seat responsible for the action.
- Rules or event-schema version needed to interpret the record later.
- Any randomness input required to reproduce the transition.
This is implementation guidance rather than a schema mandated by the sources. If random choices affect rules, preserve the seed and ensure replay uses the same deterministic random sequence, or record the outcomes that affected the state. A replay that draws fresh random values is not a replay of the original game.
Keep the log canonical
Append only accepted transitions; do not rewrite past events to make them resemble the current state. Reconstruct a state by starting from the appropriate initial conditions and applying events in sequence with the same rules logic used during live play. If rules change, retain a way to interpret older event versions—such as versioned transition logic or an explicit migration—rather than silently replaying old actions under incompatible rules.
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Separate full game state from what each player may see
The authoritative state may contain hidden cards, unrevealed objectives, or other information a seat must not receive. Keep that state on the server and generate a player-specific observation for each broadcast or reconnect response. The EigenInteractive overview describes versioned per-seat observations and limits exposure of hidden information to permitted projections.
Apply the same boundary to logs and snapshots: a client-facing payload should contain only what that player is allowed to observe, not a serialized copy of the server’s private state. A replay for one player may therefore be a sequence of that player’s observations, while an operator or game engine can retain the full canonical history under appropriate access controls.
Reconnect from a known sequence, not guesswork
Each committed transition should advance a monotonic sequence or version. Include that version with authoritative state updates. On reconnect, the client reports the last version it has applied; the server compares it with the current version and either supplies missing transitions in order or sends a fresh snapshot if the missing range is unavailable. The EigenInteractive transport documentation describes reconnect snapshots, sequence-aware catch-up, and replay from an immutable log.
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Use a gap-aware recovery protocol
An illustrative protocol—not a vendor-required contract—could return a snapshot shaped like {"gameId":"g-123","seq":42,"state":{}}, or a catch-up response shaped like {"fromSeq":43,"toSeq":46,"events":[]}. The actual state payload must be the requesting seat’s permitted projection.
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- After reconnect, ask the server for the current authoritative version and the updates available after the client’s last applied version.
- If the full missing range is retained, apply those transitions in sequence and verify that the client reaches the server’s stated version.
- If the range is unavailable, replace the client’s local base with the server snapshot, then process only later transitions.
- Ignore duplicate or stale transitions, and stop to request recovery if a sequence gap appears. Do not apply a later move to a state whose intervening history is missing.
A cold join follows the same rule as a reconnect with no usable local history: begin from a server-issued snapshot and its version. The client should not infer the authoritative version from message arrival order.
Choose between replay, snapshots and a hybrid
A reconnect snapshot and a checkpoint are related but serve different moments. A reconnect snapshot gives a client a current authoritative base. A server-side checkpoint records a state at a known sequence so the server can rebuild a long game without applying its entire history each time. The immutable event log can remain the canonical history in either case.
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| Approach | How recovery works | Main trade-off | Useful when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Replay the event log | Load the starting conditions and apply accepted events in sequence. | Processing grows with the length of the game; the full history remains directly available for replay and inspection. | Games are short enough to rebuild promptly, or reconstructing complete history is a core feature. |
| Recover from a snapshot | Load a stored state at a known sequence and continue from that base. | Less history may need processing, but the snapshot must correspond to a valid authoritative version and may not itself provide a complete turn history. | A client needs a current state, or rebuilding from the beginning is too slow for the measured recovery target. |
| Checkpoint plus event log | Load the latest compatible checkpoint, then apply later events; retain the log as the history. | Faster reconstruction can come with added storage, migration, and consistency work. | Measured replay cost warrants faster recovery while full replay or audit remains useful. |
Do not add periodic checkpoints based on an arbitrary game-length threshold: the cited documentation establishes the patterns, not a universal cutoff or benchmark. Measure replay duration, storage cost, recovery targets, and the complexity of keeping snapshots compatible with event and rules versions. Ensure a checkpoint’s sequence and state are committed from the same authoritative transition; otherwise recovery can skip or duplicate a move.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Use optimistic rendering without transferring authority
A client can show a tentative move immediately to make interaction feel responsive. That visual update is provisional: the server still validates the command, and its accepted transition is canonical. The boardgame.io documentation covers optimistic client updates; the EigenInteractive overview specifies that the server’s rules result wins if the client-side version disagrees.
When the server rejects a command or returns a different authoritative version, reconcile the interface to that version—by reverting the tentative action or replacing local state from the server response. Do not append a rejected move to the durable history.
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Test replay, concurrency and recovery failures
Exercise the boundaries where an otherwise plausible implementation can lose, duplicate, or expose state:
- Deliver the same command more than once and verify it does not create duplicate accepted turns.
- Submit two actions nearly simultaneously and confirm that only legal actions against the serialized current state are committed.
- Try invalid and out-of-turn moves and verify they cannot advance the sequence.
- Reconnect at the latest version, with a recoverable gap, and with a gap too old for retained catch-up.
- Deliver a stale update after a snapshot and confirm the client does not roll back.
- Replay a completed game and confirm the same accepted history yields the same result.
- Load older event versions after a rules or schema migration.
- Inspect every seat’s observations, reconnect snapshots, and replay payloads for information belonging only to another seat.
These checks follow from the authority, sequencing, and deterministic replay requirements; they are a practical test plan, not a complete test suite prescribed by a framework. For a turn-based game that may wait between actions, the broader Unity turn-based games documentation identifies Cloud Code as an option for implementing turn-based mechanics, but the storage guarantees and deployment fit still need to be evaluated for the chosen backend.
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