A new type of board game platform...What do you think?

Sounds fascinating, and I'm sure we'd all like to own one. But I have a few questions.

I'm guessing that your "set of pieces" is actually a small number of personal pieces of epaper, so that each player can have a private display of his collection of cards, tokens, and whatnot, along with a larger central display for the common board and play area. Game bits (cards, tokens, markers, figures, etc.) would be drawn on these epaper displays and moved around and transferred from one to another by means of some command system. If the hardware is good enough, that sounds as if it would work.

If you're not taking that approach, then I'm interested in hearing about how your system will handle games with lots of cards and bits, and how it will handle private information such as hands of cards that the other players aren't allowed to see.

Part of the fun of boardgaming is the pleasure of handling the bits themselves, and the often excellent artwork on boards and cards. But of course, many people happily play their favorite games online, and assuming your epaper has a reasonably high resolution and good color, using your product would be better than online play because you'd be in the presence of the other players. So that shouldn't be a problem either, at least for many gamers if not all.

As a designer, of course I'd love to have an easily programmable, flexible platform for playtesting.

I think the big problem is liable to be the price. If it costs like an iPod or an Xbox, then you might have a winner -- as far as the consumers are concerned, anyway. But the market for iPods and Xboxes seems to be many times larger than the boardgame market, so you may have to be satisfied with much lower sales volume than those more popular products.

But if your device costs more, I suspect few people would be willing to pay. After all, they'll still have to pay for the games themselves, even if electronic versions are cheaper than cardboard ones. This is true of Xbox too, but the difference is that you can't play a video game without a video game platform; for boardgames, you just need the game itself, a table, and enough chairs. So you'll be trying to convince gamers to buy your package on the basis of not having to carry around such a huge weight and volume of games when they travel. That may be a tough sell.

As for us designers, as I said it would be a spiffy gadget to have. But again, price is a factor. I know how to build a homemade prototype without spending a lot of cash. It does take time, but so does programming, so unless your device had a very streamlined way to create new games, I'm not sure it would save me any actual time. (I'd be delighted to be wrong!) So you're trying to sell to me based on two advantages: one, once a prototype is built it should be very easy to make changes; and two, I can email a file to my BGDF buddies so that they can easily try out my new game on their own epaper boards. That's attractive, but I'm not sure how many of us would spend hundreds of dollars to get those advantages. Some would, I'm sure. The less serious of us, the hobbyists, might not.

Finally, there are the publishers. Using it as an easy way to accept a prototype from a designer sounds great, but from what I read most publishers don't look at that many prototypes. (A recent BGDF thread was complaining that many publishers no longer accept unsolicited submissions.) And they might or might not be interested in publishing in electronic format: they will be aware that they'll wind up fighting the copy-protection wars. Of course, that hasn't stopped the video game producers, movie makers, and music companies from jumping on the electronic bandwagon, so I expect the boardgame publishers would be willing to join in also. After all, there are already home computer and online versions of many of the most popular boardgames.

I wish you all luck, and I'm eager to hear more details when you feel ready to tell us more about your project!

http://www.bgdf.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=3642

This board is actually quite different because it's basicly a large touchscreen layed flat on the table with speakers and a bit of computer in it...

Cheese.

It is very interesting. I really would to know how this project develops.
There a question about epaper, as far as I know these things are monochromatic. Is this still true or do you have color epaper nowadays?

Paulo Junior
www.2concept.com/games

A few month ago I posted somthing about using E-paper to make CCGs and boardgames. I thought that the bets way to use E-Paper was in the game board or in cards. Using E-Paper as chits could also have posabilities.

From what I know of E-Paper once you set an image on it it will remain untill it is changed with out drawing any power or needing a memory device plugged in (so you could have a game uploaded to the device and come back months later and have the same game still ready to play).

If you used pieces with a RFID tag on them and RFID readers in the board (as well as some way of tracking the movement of a piece - short distance RFID?) you could use that as a form of input to the game as well (ie you could play a card and the RFID reader could read it and determine what the card is then perform any calculations needed like update you resources, change stats like health, etc). A simple processor in the board could handle most game logic and blur the line between computer games and board games.