This looks really cool but at $499 I wouldn't let any kids near it. Hopefully it can come down in price by a lot after a few revisions, because it sure looks fun.
> Soon. We’re building tools that will let anyone design their own Board games, starting with developers and expanding to players. The future of play is one you can help create. Learn more at board.fun/developers.
So I think I understand the SDK is not available yet. Can you clarify that developer tools are not yet available but are coming soon on https://board.fun/pages/developers to avoid confusion?
To expand on the topic of the SDK: will the SDK be open-source? Will I need to register as a developer or pay a fee to get the SDK? If the SDK is open-source with no registration or fees required, then you have my attention.
The SDK is open-source, no fees required. Coming in the next week or two. We're figuring out the specific details regarding registration, and would love feedback one way or the other if this is critical for you. If you want to be notified the moment it hits, email us: developers@board.fun
> The SDK is open-source, no fees required. Coming in the next week or two. We're figuring out the specific details regarding registration
It sounds like you've already figured out that the registration would have to be optional, as you're planning to make it open-source (it will be open-source once you release it, it isn't open-source yet :) ).
Yeah, I guess they could offer a downloadable .tar once you've filled out your email on their website, or email it to you or whatever. Not sure you'd wanna add that sort of friction at that stage though, makes more sense to ask before publishing what you've built.
Cool! I don't have any concrete plans yet, but I'm looking forward to checking out the SDK when it releases. I'm relieved that you aren't going for the Xbox/Playstation/Nintendo approach.
I can tell this is much more than just “Tabletop Simulator on a tablet”, although at $500 you’re likely to get a lot of attention from the Twilight Imperium and Gloomhaven crowd. I know more than a few childless people in my local gaming circle who would drop a half-large on accessories that simplify game execution.
But clearly this product isn’t about making existing board games easier to set-up/play/clean-up. I think the marketing dept has a lot of heavy lifting to do, convincing buyers that this isn’t just Juicero for existing board games.
I play games like Gloomhaven and TI4. Not sure how this product would simplify anything. Far too small for any of the more complex board games. I guess I could scroll around but then what does physical piece detection give me? Then it’s $500USD. My game group and myself got Gloomhaven from Epic for free and played through the campaign together. BGA subscription is cheap. So many games have online implementations that are free. And I can buy a lot of boardgames for $500.
Maybe they need to work with the creators of Gloomhaven etc to design their next game specifically so it can be played on this tablet, to cut down on the need for bookkeeping.
The main problem with games like Gloomhaven and TI4 isn’t the book keeping. It’s getting the people around a table at the same time. Need 6 players for TI4 and the same group multiple times for a campaign. Hence why I’ve been playing the digital versions online with my group.
it does open up some possibility for mechanics that exploit the fact that the play area ("board") is almost infinitely mutable.
But honestly concepts like this, mixing of physical and digital, have been tried to very little success in the gaming space for years. Out best success is wii-motion controls and rockband-era .. elaborate controllers. But there have been card games that utilized cameras to read the cards, skylanders, etc.
Actually this is closest to some of the things that original run of microsoft surface tables could do. I played some backgammon on one with physical dice and disks. It was .. fine, but it was just backgammon, they were just showing off the object tracking features. The only thing you could do with the board was some fancy animated board themes.
Anyways all of that stuff is largely abandoned. So I wish these guys luck.
Exact same thoughts here. This should, imo, be marketed at boardgame nerds, who are adults, and not 3-7 year olds which it seems to currently be. Which toddler is asking for this for christmas? I suppose a boardgame nerd might buy it to use with their toddler, but that is a niche of a niche of a niche.
Reminds of Microsoft Surface, the original coffee table [1]. It was quite cool at the time, but too expensive for what could have been useful application.
Hopefully for them, this will have more luck.
On a side not, the website is completely blank on Firefox.
Not quite the first such product, Microsoft's original "Surface" advertised similar boardgame potential. But if it worked well, I don't know of anyone who was rich enough to try it!
Detection technology on Board is much more robust. The MS Surface FTIR approach was lovely, but so over-featured no one could imagine a scoped-down (ie. cheaper) version of it.
Aha, so there are ex-Surface developers working on this too! That's reassuring actually. Yeah, the boardgame demos of Surface were gorgeous, and I was definitively disappointed that this cool technology didn't "arrive" even as the years went by. Wishing you all good luck, and I may have to see how hard it is to get my hands on one of these...
I have a first gen surface in storage. Company I was working for wanted to get rid of the heavy as hell awkward thing... There is a backgammon app on it, when i played it years earlier there were physical dice and pieces. Buy lost from my table or not included, but playable by tap as well.
Cool product. Is the SDK open? Any time I play a complex board game like Ark Nova, Spirit Island, etc. game running consumes a lot of time. So this tool is to me better showcased with a complex game that needs game-running that computers handle better. Also I'm curious about the board pieces and how more could be made. Do they have stickers on the bottom I could just transpose onto existing pieces, etc
Nice job! Very slick demo video. As a dev, a couple of things immediately stand out to me.
1. Launching at $500 means it is going to be a "relatively" boutique product. At around the same price as an iPad Air, you're definitely going to want to focus on how the included games simply would not be playable on a more conventional touchscreen interface without the corresponding physical components.
Which leads to my second question:
2. Are the included physical pieces modular / generic enough such that prospective game developers could leverage them in future apps, or would they essentially need to design, 3D print, or contract out to your team to create their own props?
1. This is absolutely the case for the launch portfolio. These games are super unique experiences that are really only possible from mixing the physical and digital in this way. Does the site not make that clear to you? Super useful feedback!
2. The piece sets can be used as is for new games/apps, especially for prototyping! However if it’s super promising and you want to bring it into our (future) store, we’d love to work with you to make a bespoke set of pieces to go with the game. Whether the launch sets are modular enough as-is is really dependent on the ergonomics and aesthetics of the game you want to make. We’re excited to make ourselves available to devs who want to explore this though, and happy to work with folks to figure out ways forward.
> 1. super unique experiences that are really only possible from mixing the physical and digital in this way. Does the site not make that clear to you?
Yes most of those game don't look like they significantly add anything to the experience over similar already existing games that have or easily could have tablet versions. Even if they are doing a bit more website makes them look like cheap versions of well established computer games.
Bloogs -> that's just lemmings
Spycraft -> doesn't look like something you couldn't design touchscreen controls with little effect on puzzles
Omakase -> you are selecting positions + direction within grid, don't see why press and swipe on touchscreen wouldn't work
Mushka -> the tamagochi style game. All that the special pieces achieve is select an action which could easily be done with touchscreen menu and afterwords positioning it with finger
Cosmic crush -> again one more game where all you do is move single game piece per player on a grid
Space rocks -> asteroid like spaceship shooter
Snek -> just point the finger directly on touchscreen without special game pieces
Out of all them maybe 2 look like they are trying to consider unique strengths of the physical game pieces. The cooking game and 3d block game. And even for those it feels questionable whether it provides sufficient improvement compared to existing games.
By it's nature product like this means that you get worst parts of niche gaming console and a physical board game. Niche console means that the set of available games will be very limited with many of them either being ports from other platforms using generic pieces (meaning you can just play them on those other more popular platforms) or the gameplay isn't as good due too limited budget. Hardly any developer is going to spend years to design unique game for niche platform with very limited player base.
And like with physical board games you need to buy the pieces in physical store or have them delivered.
Tilt-5 also tried to fill the gap between digital and physical board games. They had much more interesting value add but that wasn't enough.
Not the OP, but in the TechCrunch Disrupt launch, founder Brynn Putnam says, "capacitive material manufactured into the pieces."
If you put capacitive material in a unique pattern on the footprint of each piece, and the rest of the piece material was conductive enough to carry your body's charge to register a touch, the shape of that touch could be unique per-piece.
There's no mention of syncing pieces, charging pieces, keeping pieces in view of a wide-angle camera, anything like that, so that's my bet. (This would also mean moving a piece using a non-conductive material would be a way to cheat by having it not get registered!)
I just shared this on LI this morning, linking back to a video showing showing related touchscreen explorations I did for a colleague in early 2013, sensing different coins by their radii as you touch them: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vmiliano_a-vertical-triptych-...
This is nearly bang on correct. The pieces don't contain any electronics or sensors, they have a conductive pattern built into the surface using specialized materials and a manufacturing technique we developed in house. Our custom software stack processes the raw data from the device's touch sensor using embedded ML on the NPU, which detects and tracks the pieces in real time.
That said, the device can detect the pieces whether you touch them or not. Touching them absolutely does change the response, and we pass that along as a parameter to the SDK.
Your coin exploration is seriously cool, please hit me up when you're next in NYC!
> they have a conductive pattern built into the surface using specialized materials and a manufacturing technique we developed in house.
Would this be something a home 3D printer could do? I'm not a maker but I could see the value of others being able to quickly build a universe of playing pieces if that was possible.
It's possible to make your own pieces with a multi-material 3d printer (our early prototypes have been made with Bambu X1C & H2D printers), though it's pretty finicky to do so, and requires some rather expensive filament. Happy to help anyone along though!
Reminds me of some ~10 years ago I found a dirt cheap game in a budget bin in some store. It contained a few plastic, pre-painted, miniatures, that had some kind of special base with bumps on (possibly in some unique pattern for each miniature?) and then you were supposed to install an app game on a tablet and place the miniatures on the tablet to move them and have their locations (badly) tracked. Seems like it may have been a similar technology, but you only had to pay for the playing tokens and use a standard tablet. Not sure if special hardware is needed for better tracking of enough tokens or if a standard tablet today could be used with the right software?
Game(s) that you were supposed to play was not very fun, in addition to the tracking not working well, as I remember it, but I may still have the miniatures somewhere. There was another game from the same company that I also bought at the same time, but that one was made to be played with a phone camera as some kind of AR game instead, moving some plastic objects on a table, that also worked about as well as the other game.
Looks really cool though did not see what the SDK is or languages it requires? I've built game tables before with flat panel TVs and web tech, but have wanted to integrate miniatures, position, etc into the apps.
> At around the same price as an iPad Air, you're definitely going to want to focus on how the included games simply would not be playable on a more conventional touchscreen interface without the corresponding physical components.
And why that’s worth $500. I can’t think of any game(s) that are so fun or unique I’d pay $500 to be able to play them, even with my family.
This looks like a perfect match for the music synth ReacTable, something that never ported well to ipad because of the lack of physical pieces.
But my concern would be that this becomes just another Ad platform, but targeted at kids.
For me a board-game is offline time. So I would picture this with no WiFi and SD card based games. Which could still be profitable via an other-device app store. But would also avoid temptation for developers to add these more addictive online/networked games.
That's fair but not universal. Plenty of communities exist around playing board games online and often that's the only way to meet players of equal strength or run large tournaments.
Looks a lot like The Last Gameboard[1], which almost worked well (but didn’t, at least for me). It had a mechanism for detecting and tracking pieces, and a module for FoundryVTT, but the tracking was too glitchy. And the hardware was too slow.
There is a huge demand for an off the shelf device like this for TTRPGs. There are entire companies making animated maps that are predicated on people laying a TV on its back on a table and building a custom case for it. I imagine they would all love to sell their maps on a dedicated off the shelf product.
Many say they would be useful for RPGs, but how? I know those that play with a large screen (i.e. old tv) on the table to display maps while playing. You do not need to track the pieces for that though? Typically the GM has a phone or laptop with a UI to control what is displayed when, to reveal new areas etc. I can't imagine a game or time when it would make sense that a player moves a miniature/token on a digital board and triggers something that happens automatically? Maybe if you were playing more like a solo or coop CRPG without a GM, but that is a completely different kind of game and everyone here is specifically mentioning using it to support TTRPGs.
Yes, I could see a lot of GMs being interested in plug in and go product that fills that niche. Implementing the right feature set is challenging, as existing dedicated virtual tabletops have already shown. But something like a simple Owlbear Rodeo extension that adds basic miniature recognition might be all we need.
its too small to work for TTRPGs at the moment but if we could get the capacitive pattern tech and expand that to work on digitiser layer on a tv sized screen, i would be really cool.
As a player: What's the lag? Does it depend on the game and the gesture?
As a developer: I'd like to implement a "game" which would be ideal for Dynamicland (tens of cards with ID stickers on the corners), but this might be a simpler platform to set up and use. Would that be possible with the board as sold?
Also curious about latency. In the past I've worked around latency using video sensors for high-bandwidth high-latency features, then literally glued a contact mic to my interface to get low latency tap detection. How does the Board hide latency?
This looks super cool, thanks for sharing! Very interested. How much storage does a typical game require? I assume the SD slot allows for storage expansion? Are you able to share what it's running on under the hood? I assume Android/Linux?
My hot take is that there are seem to be really two markets here:
1.) Candy crush type board games targeting kids with well-off parents. Basically really focused on immersive and interactive visuals like effects and cutscenes.
2.) Serious board games targeting older teenagers and adults playing heavy games with BoardGameGeek weightings of above 3.5 with money to spend on their own hobby. Think games like 18XX, Brass Birmingham, Dune, Terraforming Mars or Gloomhaven. They would find the digital board game experience useful for accessing expansion maps (i.e. 18xx) or expansion campaigns (Gloomhaven). Additional features of interest might be solo play against automated players, game state/score tracking, game tutorials.
It almost feels like these two groups would have such different profiles that two separate marketing approaches should be attempted.
Dude I had jamboards with this idea but I could never get root on the device to make it work but clearly the hardware must exist. In the end I had to sell the damn things.
It's cute but it's definitely niche, especially given the price. It's got some real potential for immersive D&D games though if the Board could use feedback from pieces people placed on the board.
Pretty cool! Did you think about a way to handle games that need some secret elements (e.g. cards with roles/resources) that should be kept away from other players?
We've played around with detecting various hand and arm gestures to digitally reveal/hide hidden information, but none of our launch titles ended up needing it. If you've got an idea that requires it, happy to work with you to make it happen!
Just launched today at TechCrunch Disrupt. Our 12 game launch portfolio was all developed in Unity using our sdk, and we cannot be more excited to see what developers can make with our launch piece sets!
what is the accessibility story with this? One of the most difficult thing for blind people is having accessible board games where multiple cards or board state should be remembered and AR-ing the table seems to have some potential. If the board can pair with airbuds and the state could be easily described, it might have lots of blind clients.
Does Foundry have any of the interactive features this product offers? I'd imagine the real killer feature would be to place your miniature (I'm sure somebody could make a killing selling Board-compatible minis) on the board and have its position update in the software.
Me and a dungeon master friend of mine are interested in developing for this. Is there a cost associated with the SDK? Or can we just buy a Board and get to it?
There's currently a Unity SDK, we're just super focused on our launch and haven't been able to flesh out those pages. We'll be fleshing it out over the coming weeks, email developer@board.fun to hear about it the moment we update!
Honestly it's nice enough as an encased screen for TTRPG virtual tabletop play. I have a few friends that have built custom tabletops to hold consumer TVs or have set up top down projectors (worse)... those are solutions for the deeply dedicated. Something even simpler that this is a pretty nice form-factor for a somewhat more modest table.
> Can I add or create my own games?
> Soon. We’re building tools that will let anyone design their own Board games, starting with developers and expanding to players. The future of play is one you can help create. Learn more at board.fun/developers.
So I think I understand the SDK is not available yet. Can you clarify that developer tools are not yet available but are coming soon on https://board.fun/pages/developers to avoid confusion?
It sounds like you've already figured out that the registration would have to be optional, as you're planning to make it open-source (it will be open-source once you release it, it isn't open-source yet :) ).
Anyone tried just taking a picture of a messy Ticket to Ride-board with ChatGPT?
But clearly this product isn’t about making existing board games easier to set-up/play/clean-up. I think the marketing dept has a lot of heavy lifting to do, convincing buyers that this isn’t just Juicero for existing board games.
What’s the draw here?
But honestly concepts like this, mixing of physical and digital, have been tried to very little success in the gaming space for years. Out best success is wii-motion controls and rockband-era .. elaborate controllers. But there have been card games that utilized cameras to read the cards, skylanders, etc.
Actually this is closest to some of the things that original run of microsoft surface tables could do. I played some backgammon on one with physical dice and disks. It was .. fine, but it was just backgammon, they were just showing off the object tracking features. The only thing you could do with the board was some fancy animated board themes.
Anyways all of that stuff is largely abandoned. So I wish these guys luck.
Hopefully for them, this will have more luck.
On a side not, the website is completely blank on Firefox.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRU3NemA95k
Hopefully the technology has matured since then.
Detection technology on Board is much more robust. The MS Surface FTIR approach was lovely, but so over-featured no one could imagine a scoped-down (ie. cheaper) version of it.
It behaved very similar to the Board. It definitely had a "knob" that you placed on a screen could spin to make adjustments.
1. Launching at $500 means it is going to be a "relatively" boutique product. At around the same price as an iPad Air, you're definitely going to want to focus on how the included games simply would not be playable on a more conventional touchscreen interface without the corresponding physical components.
Which leads to my second question:
2. Are the included physical pieces modular / generic enough such that prospective game developers could leverage them in future apps, or would they essentially need to design, 3D print, or contract out to your team to create their own props?
2. The piece sets can be used as is for new games/apps, especially for prototyping! However if it’s super promising and you want to bring it into our (future) store, we’d love to work with you to make a bespoke set of pieces to go with the game. Whether the launch sets are modular enough as-is is really dependent on the ergonomics and aesthetics of the game you want to make. We’re excited to make ourselves available to devs who want to explore this though, and happy to work with folks to figure out ways forward.
Yes most of those game don't look like they significantly add anything to the experience over similar already existing games that have or easily could have tablet versions. Even if they are doing a bit more website makes them look like cheap versions of well established computer games.
Bloogs -> that's just lemmings
Spycraft -> doesn't look like something you couldn't design touchscreen controls with little effect on puzzles
Omakase -> you are selecting positions + direction within grid, don't see why press and swipe on touchscreen wouldn't work
Mushka -> the tamagochi style game. All that the special pieces achieve is select an action which could easily be done with touchscreen menu and afterwords positioning it with finger
Cosmic crush -> again one more game where all you do is move single game piece per player on a grid
Space rocks -> asteroid like spaceship shooter
Snek -> just point the finger directly on touchscreen without special game pieces
Out of all them maybe 2 look like they are trying to consider unique strengths of the physical game pieces. The cooking game and 3d block game. And even for those it feels questionable whether it provides sufficient improvement compared to existing games.
By it's nature product like this means that you get worst parts of niche gaming console and a physical board game. Niche console means that the set of available games will be very limited with many of them either being ports from other platforms using generic pieces (meaning you can just play them on those other more popular platforms) or the gameplay isn't as good due too limited budget. Hardly any developer is going to spend years to design unique game for niche platform with very limited player base. And like with physical board games you need to buy the pieces in physical store or have them delivered.
Tilt-5 also tried to fill the gap between digital and physical board games. They had much more interesting value add but that wasn't enough.
If you put capacitive material in a unique pattern on the footprint of each piece, and the rest of the piece material was conductive enough to carry your body's charge to register a touch, the shape of that touch could be unique per-piece.
There's no mention of syncing pieces, charging pieces, keeping pieces in view of a wide-angle camera, anything like that, so that's my bet. (This would also mean moving a piece using a non-conductive material would be a way to cheat by having it not get registered!)
I just shared this on LI this morning, linking back to a video showing showing related touchscreen explorations I did for a colleague in early 2013, sensing different coins by their radii as you touch them: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vmiliano_a-vertical-triptych-...
That said, the device can detect the pieces whether you touch them or not. Touching them absolutely does change the response, and we pass that along as a parameter to the SDK.
Your coin exploration is seriously cool, please hit me up when you're next in NYC!
Would this be something a home 3D printer could do? I'm not a maker but I could see the value of others being able to quickly build a universe of playing pieces if that was possible.
Should Mars After Midnight be released on Steam?
Game(s) that you were supposed to play was not very fun, in addition to the tracking not working well, as I remember it, but I may still have the miniatures somewhere. There was another game from the same company that I also bought at the same time, but that one was made to be played with a phone camera as some kind of AR game instead, moving some plastic objects on a table, that also worked about as well as the other game.
And why that’s worth $500. I can’t think of any game(s) that are so fun or unique I’d pay $500 to be able to play them, even with my family.
But my concern would be that this becomes just another Ad platform, but targeted at kids.
For me a board-game is offline time. So I would picture this with no WiFi and SD card based games. Which could still be profitable via an other-device app store. But would also avoid temptation for developers to add these more addictive online/networked games.
That's fair but not universal. Plenty of communities exist around playing board games online and often that's the only way to meet players of equal strength or run large tournaments.
[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gameboard1/gameboard-1
As a developer: I'd like to implement a "game" which would be ideal for Dynamicland (tens of cards with ID stickers on the corners), but this might be a simpler platform to set up and use. Would that be possible with the board as sold?
But you still need physical pieces to loose and store.
Reminds me of a “digital roulette wheel” I saw in a casino.. which was wierd, untrustworthy yet somehow very cool.
My hot take is that there are seem to be really two markets here:
1.) Candy crush type board games targeting kids with well-off parents. Basically really focused on immersive and interactive visuals like effects and cutscenes.
2.) Serious board games targeting older teenagers and adults playing heavy games with BoardGameGeek weightings of above 3.5 with money to spend on their own hobby. Think games like 18XX, Brass Birmingham, Dune, Terraforming Mars or Gloomhaven. They would find the digital board game experience useful for accessing expansion maps (i.e. 18xx) or expansion campaigns (Gloomhaven). Additional features of interest might be solo play against automated players, game state/score tracking, game tutorials.
It almost feels like these two groups would have such different profiles that two separate marketing approaches should be attempted.
edit: found this https://arkenforge.com/using-a-touch-screen-with-your-digita...
As a parent I wish it had more details on the durability. I can just imagine spills, slams, non-game pieces being used and abused on this thing.
Or maybe even a proper wargame, although I guess it might be too small.
The order form only allows US shipping adresses as is.
> Every purchase is covered by a 1-year warranty for peace of mind protection.
Uh, why are you marketing a bare minimum (often legally required) warranty as a pro? It kinda conflicts with "built to last"!
You'd be better off not even mentioning it.