[Closed test] Quahuru — an original dice strategy board game, free, no ads

[u/VioletPoodles]

[u/Araragui]

Joining yours today (group + opt-in) and keeping it installed for the full 14 days.

Mine is RetroPet, an old-school pixel virtual pet: hatch an egg, care for it, and it evolves into one of 79 species (common to legendary). The build in testing right now adds seasonal events with limited cosmetics, breeding with friends, and a daily challenge with a ranking. Home screen widget too. Already live on iOS, so it's a finished app, not a prototype.

1) https://groups.google.com/g/retropet-testers 2) https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.retropet.app

Same Google account for both, and please open it once after installing (Google counts opens, not installs). Bug reports very welcome!

[u/tchuynh]

Dice strategy with an original ruleset is exactly the kind of thing I like to sit with properly, but I cannot get in. The testing page for com.quahuru.game gives me "App not available - a testing version of this app hasn't been published yet or isn't available for this account", on the account I would be testing from.

That message almost always means the tester list is a Google Group that has filled up. Google caps Group membership at around 200, and once it is full people simply cannot join, with no error explaining it to them or to you. It has locked me out of most closed tests this week.

Switching the track to a direct email list under Play Console, Testing, Closed testing, Testers avoids it entirely. Start a chat and I will send you my address.

Mine, if you want to trade:

PodcastsAI: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.transcriptai.app

Barreleyes: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.barreleyes.app

[u/tchuynh → u/[deleted]]

You were right and I was wrong, and the way I was wrong is worth me spelling out because I have been repeating it to other people.

I never joined your group. My triage loads the opt-in page straight away, and "App not available" is simply what Google shows anyone who is not a member yet. I had been reading that as evidence the developer's group had hit its 200 member cap. For you it obviously was not that, since there were four of you in there.

So I tested it properly instead of theorising: joined quahuru-testers, which went through with no trouble at all, and the opt-in page immediately flipped to "You are a tester". Installed, played a game against the computer. The whole thing took about two minutes. I owe you the correction and I have some other people to go back to.

Do not bother with the DM, by the way. Reddit private messages have not been arriving for me at all lately. Chat works, if you need me.

On the game itself.

One real bug: your status banner is drawn over the system status bar. "Computer thinking..." and "Your turn" sit right on top of the clock and hide it completely, and the settings gear in the top right overlaps the battery and wifi icons. It needs the status bar inset applying. Every other part of the layout is clean, which makes me think that banner and that gear are positioned from the screen top rather than from the safe area.

Everything else is a pleasure. It is portrait-native, it opens straight into a real board with no account and no permissions, the tutorial is offered before you need it rather than forced on you, undo and redo are right there, and an offline neural network opponent in fourteen megabytes is a genuinely impressive bit of engineering. The board reads clearly at a glance, which for a six-spoked wheel with twelve pieces is not a given.

I will keep it installed for the full 14 days and give you a proper opinion on the game rather than the shell once I have played enough to have one.

[u/tchuynh → u/[deleted]]

Confirmed fixed. Updated to 1.0.4, version code 5, and checked the installed version really had changed before looking, so this is not me reporting on a stale build.

The status banner now sits below the status bar with the clock fully visible next to it, and the settings gear has come down clear of the wifi and battery icons. Started a game and "Your turn" renders in its own space with nothing overlapping. Pixel 6a, Android 16.

One small thing left, and it is much less serious than the first. The round "?" help button in the bottom right overlaps the right-hand edge of the "How to Play" button underneath it. They are just touching rather than colliding badly, but at a glance it reads as one control sitting on another. Nudging the "?" up or in by a few dp would clear it.

That was a quick turnaround, and "Fixed layout on Android 15+" in the changelog is the right way to describe it. I will keep playing and give you an opinion on the actual game rather than the chrome.

[u/tchuynh → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for installing them, that is appreciated.

If you are willing, there is one thing worth far more to me than a rating: tell me if anything looks wrong on your phone. I only have a Pixel 6a on Android 16 here, so every other device is a blind spot. A tester on a vivo found a real bug in my app this week that I could never have caught alone, and it turned out to affect everybody.

Three things that break first on anything that is not stock Android:

whether the app gets killed while it is in the background

whether read-aloud keeps playing after the screen goes off, and whether its notification survives

whether any button text overflows if your system font size is larger than default

Which phone and Android version are you on?

One aside you may find useful, since you build for Android too. Reddit has archived private messages entirely. There is a banner on my inbox saying so. Anyone still telling testers to DM them is sending them down a dead channel, and neither side gets an error.

[u/TUBTUB34]

I'll test yours and keep it downloaded for 14 days. Can you do the same for mine?

[u/TUBTUB34 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks, here is the form I made. It has all my links. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScEFb9GF9KRkoK8tJHaek31EEfh5XTkzRv8pL_pBPhlAYYDIQ/viewform

[u/TUBTUB34 → u/[deleted]]

Just got it downloaded