Could the rasberry pie be used in board game design?

If your designing games for the kid's market, I know broker/agents want to see games with dohickeys. With Python, an open architecture, and a pretty huge hacker base out there you could prototype any sort of game electronics from card scanners to an active board game to controlling a laser. It is affordable enough to send to some playtesters. Smart phones offer a different avenue, but aren't nearly as open architecturally.

Hmm, laser writing, gives me some ideas... Like if I wanted a huge amount of random events at some point, electronics would become cheaper than cards. Or use a text to voice bit for events.

Thanks for tossing this out there, kinda lets me keep that as a potential tool in game design. I definitely have a few deadends I could consider with this option.

One thing I would love to use electronics for in a game, and that I guess could be controlled by a RPi, would be a block game where each block has a small LCD (or eInk) display instead of a sticker. That way you could configure the blocks for many different games, and also of course dynamically update the units when things happen. Sort of the opposite of having a game table with a big screen that you move static unit tokens on, because you could use a static cardboard map, but have all the fancy electronic-controlled stuff happen on the units.

There are companies that produce small radio-controlled displays, like those designed to put on shelves in a store. Unfortunately I do not know of any that are good enough and cheap enough for a game.

I think a raspberry pi would have been perfect for Space Alert instead of using a cd. Start a game, it randomly links events together. Imaging event cards that actually spoke to you and forced a timely response. The HDMI cable could be connected to a TV to show video as well.

You could also use RFID tags and a RFID reader to input info.

With the right app, it should be possible to network the raspberry pi with tablets/smartphones, maybe even via bluetooth (would need a module add-on though).

...which would allow miniatures with a conductive bottom to close circuits. The Raspberry also has 8 GPIO and can support I2C, meaning printing a board with multiple circuit paths is possible. It you need more than 8 pathways (assuming you're using the GPIOs as detectors), you could get an I2C chip to expand the connections. You could tell if any miniature is at a specific location, for example.

And 3D printers almost makes it feel like Star Trek.