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.
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!
Should Mars After Midnight be released on Steam?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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 :) ).
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?
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.
The order form only allows US shipping adresses as is.
edit: found this https://arkenforge.com/using-a-touch-screen-with-your-digita...
nicoles•23h ago