The entire VASSAL board-wargame library as a LaunchBox platform — 3,331 games with box art, manuals, and one-click launch

[DrEvil]

The entire VASSAL board-wargame library as a LaunchBox platform — 3,331 games with box art, manuals, and one-click launch (assuming you have downloaded the module)

As far as I can tell this is a first, so I wanted to share it: the complete VASSAL library is now a fully-built LaunchBox platform.

If you haven't met it, VASSAL is a free, open-source engine for playing tabletop board wargames on a PC — think hex-and-counter classics like Afrika Korps or ASL, but also everything from ancients to sci-fi. Each game is a "module" (a .vmod file) hosted in the official library at vassalengine.org. The library holds 3,557 projects; 3,315 of them have a downloadable module. It's very much alive — over half the catalog had its current module released in the last six years.  It is an amazing system.

What's in the platform:

- 3,331 games in a single VASSAL platform XML — the library's entire downloadable catalog, with title, publisher, year, era/scale/topic metadata pulled from the library's own catalog data.

- VASSAL registered as the "emulator." Each game's application path points at its module file, so hitting Play opens the game in VASSAL exactly like launching a ROM.

- Art for nearly every game: box covers as Box - Front (3,106 games), the actual game-map scans as Fanart - Background (3,077), and composite counter sheets as gameplay screenshots (3,108). All of it harvested out of the modules themselves, so it's the real components, not placeholders.

- Manuals that actually work: 676 games have the rulebook PDF bundled inside their module. Those get extracted automatically — the rules PDF becomes the LaunchBox manual, and any other PDFs in the module (charts, playbooks, scenario books) attach as Additional Apps, one click away on the game's page.

- Nothing copyrighted gets redistributed. Every game record carries custom fields with the module's official download URL and its sha256, plus an Installed yes/no stamped from what's on disk. The XML is really an index: you fetch only the modules you want, straight from the official library. (If you want everything, a one-module-per-game mirror runs about 85 GB.)

How it was built: the whole platform is generated by a script from vassalengine.org's public JSON catalog (all 3,557 projects censused, zero API errors, politely rate-limited) plus asset extraction from the module files. Regenerating refreshes installed flags, art, and manuals. I built it with heavy AI assistance as part of a larger project around making these games more playable.

Some flavor on what the catalog actually contains, from its own tags: WWII is the center of mass (813 games), then gunpowder-era (340), fantasy (305), moderns and ancients; roughly a thousand tactical titles, nine hundred operational, six hundred strategic. If you have any interest in board wargaming, this platform turns LaunchBox into a genuinely spectacular shelf for it.

Screenshots attached. Happy to go deeper on how any piece of it works if there's interest.