That could be the first computer assisted board game

A new board game was announced by fantasy flight which required the user to have an app on a touch device to play the game. The game is called XCOM, it's a board game adaptation of the video game:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=269

First I loved the new XCOM video game, it's one of the best turn based strategy video game that was released in the last 5 years. Or maybe I should say that it's the only TBS game that was released. Since Koei is not making any more TBS and system soft alpha is not releasing in America, I had to start playing board games.

Recently, I had various discussion thread about board game design requiring abstracting concepts and mechanics which for me made it harder to design. So I need to take another game's mechanics and refine from there. While for video games you don't have to search for mechanics, you just implement a game by defining your database structure and operations the player can do.

I am currently searching what kind of design I want to do. I would be aiming maybe for single player board game. One thing that is annoying in board game is for example to upkeep information, while in a video game, you could make an update script that update values in a push of a button. So one thing for sure, single player board games could benefit from this.

I also said once that video games should learn from board games and vice versa. Maybe now it's the opportunity to have such kind of hybrid games. It could increase the possibilities of board games by making them less abstract.

Now I don't have any cell phone or tablet, so it would be currently hard for me to play the game. I don't really like it either the need to require additional material. But if many board games get's released this way, you could probably need only 1 tablet for all your games. And in multi-player games, only one of the player's needs the tablet.

One thing that seems interesting is that the application part could implement things which are easy to manage by an app but hard for a player. For example, updating values or other bookkeeping task at the end of a turn. On the other hand, the stuff hard to implement as a video game that can easily be handled by a human stay in the board game aspect. For example: applying unique rule text, very hard to do by a computer. So it seems like the best of both worlds.

Another thing, as a variant designer, even if there is a computer part to the game, it would not break much the possibility to modify the game, it might even increase it. First, the app could probably be modable. Which allow to do certain things like changing text on virtual cards that would not be possible in a real board game. Second, people could supply their own app. Else the board game part remains modifiable.

So as an ex-computer programmer, maybe my future is there, make computer assisted board game. It would probably work better for single player games, by making them easier to play, but it could probably be expanded to some multi-player game. Still, I would offer the option to do it with board game only method that would require more time and work in case somebody does not have a digital device.