You may not have heard of Board - a week ago, I hadn't. Physically, it's a 24" touchscreen device that you lay on a tabletop, and it runs videogames that you interact with using custom physical pieces, a bit like a board game. There's nothing quite like it on the entertainment market, and when I see a tech start-up selling something unprecedented I want to see proof that it's neither a scam nor a damn fool idea before I entertain the third possibility - that it might be a work of genius. So I rang up the team at Board, and Chief Creative Officer Seth Sivak agreed to show me how the hardware works over video call. And now that I've seen it, I think it could disrupt the gaming market in ways we haven't seen since the Nintendo Wii.
Sivak took my call in his office, where he'd been testing a new build of 'Save the Bloogs', one of the twelve games that Board will ship with at launch. With the Atlantic ocean between us, a hands-on demo at short notice was never going to happen, but Sivak had a second camera feed positioned over the Board so I could watch him place pieces on it and interact with it. Perhaps most importantly, I could assure myself that yes, production models of this thing really do exist, and it really is ready to ship to customers.
The pitch for Board is strong, if perhaps a little idealistic. Modern videogames - even multiplayer videogames - are isolated experiences. The latest Mariokart may still allow four player local co-op, but its big marketing feature is a twenty player online mode. Board promises to bring players together around the same table, playing videogames the same way you play the best board games - though some of the arcadey titles look sufficiently action packed that they might better compare with bar games like air hockey.
I was skeptical of the project. Games consoles are murderously difficult products to launch, and successful games consoles coming from startups are almost unheard of. With the exception of Nintendo, all major games consoles sell at a loss, with real revenues coming from game sales. Board is launching at $499 for early adopters before floating up to $699, and the only way I could square it being bigger and more rugged than an iPad, but costing less, was if it was a loss leader.
Sivak says that's not the case. He credits Brynn Putnam, the entrepreneur who founded the company and started the project, with some very good industry connections, which is credible: her first product was a smart mirror that streamed fitness programmes, a brand called Mirror that Lululemon paid half a billion dollars to acquire. And it turns out that Board's specifications are not very high end: the 24 inch screen has a mundane 1920 x 1080 resolution, and it's powered by an adequate but unexceptional Mediatek Genio 700 CPU.
If it runs the games it's designed to run, that may not matter. It's how Nintendo designs products, a strategy internally described as "lateral thinking with withered technology". Nintendo uses proven, mid-range components because they're cheaper, supply isn't in doubt the same way that it is for high end chips, and because - in Nintendo's opinion - if you need a lot of processing power to make a fun game, you've failed as a designer. It doesn't always produce results - the Virtual Boy and WiiU are notable flubs - but when it does you get the Wii, a relatively low powered console that handily outsold its competitors the Xbox 360 and PS3.
Even assuming Board units are profitable, most of its profit is going to come from game sales, which requires game developers to make the games and customers to buy them. That's the other reason that successful games console start-ups are so rare: customers won't buy a console unless it has games; developers won't make games unless there are customers.
Board has funded the development of all twelve of its launch titles, and Sivak confirms that funds will be available in some form to assist other studios and keep the flow of games coming.
Of these, some were designed in house by Sivak and his team, working with partners to complete them. Others were wholly created by other studios with Board's support. The abstract strategy game Strata comes from Studio Chyr, the team behind the mind bending puzzle game Manifold Garden, who Sivak says actually pitched several games. An escape room game, Spycraft, was created by State of Play, best known for its BAFTA award winning Lumino City.
Spacefire
So let's get onto those games. The first that Sivak showed me was Spacefire, a reimplementation of the classic Asteroids. Each of up to four players takes a triangular space ship and places it on the screen, and suddenly it's part of the game - it shoots automatically, and your goal is to move it around to blast the wireframe asteroids that pelt across the screen, avoid getting hit, and score points faster than your opponent. It's simple, arcadey fun, but the tech that connects the physical game pieces to the simulated world on the game screen is very interesting.
The base of each playing piece is inlaid with a unique glyph made from a conductive material, which the Board uses to identify the piece and determine its orientation. It's apparently very cheap to make these components compared to RFID tags, and so far they seem to work; throughout the demos I saw, Board identified pieces correctly and instantly.
Sivak says the machine learning algorithm used to detect the glyphs is trained using a robot, which manually places each piece on a Board screen in every possible position and orientation to feed the system data.
You could make a game like Spacefire using a regular touch screen, but the glyph technology has capabilities that a touch screen doesn't. A high-end iPad can detect 10 inputs at once, and if you wanted to detect both the position and orientation of an object via that interface, you'd have to use three inputs per object - so a purely touch based detection system could handle a maximum of three objects at once. Sivak says that the number of pieces Board can detect is limited only by the amount of space there is to place them on the screen.
Chop Chop
The glyphs on Board's pieces don't just encode the position of a piece, they also encode data about it. In Spacefire this just identifies which of the identical spaceships belongs to which player, but in the next demo I got to see a more advanced example.
Chop Chop is a collaborative cooking game for one to four players. Orders come in, and you've got to grab ingredients, prepare them at various stations, and serve up the grub - a very similar recipe to popular multiplayer videogame Overcooked.
But the control system is totally different. Rather than moving a little toon around with a controller, you're playing chef with tiny plastic implements. Each operation in the kitchen needs a different little tool - a knife to chop, a spoon to stir, a salt-shaker to finish off a meal. It's another capability of the glyph detection system. The classic handheld cooking game Cooking Mama on the Nintendo DS used a touch screen interface, but each stage of a recipe was divided into its own minigame - here, they're all happening at once.
Just like Overcooked, the fun should come from the chaos. But where the slapstick in Overcooked takes place entirely within the screen, Chop Chop players should be scrabbling around their table trying to pick up the correct implement - which brings to mind frantic physical party board games like Jungle Snap or Cobra Paw.
Strata
The next demo, Strata, was far more cerebral. It's an abstract area control game that looks like the bastard lovechild of Tetris and a crossword. The goal is to color in the white squares on a gridded board with your color using large white pentominoes. Each round the game tells you which three pieces to place - you can align these on the board in any orientation, provided your first piece touches or overlaps your existing colored area.
And when I say 'any orientation', that includes standing up, or even propping blocks over one another - sometimes a necessary move, as certain spaces can only be claimed by a piece raised a certain height above the board.
Strata looks like a promising abstract strategy board game that could probably be de-made into a purely analog edition, but there are clear advantages to this digital hybrid. The computer takes away the job of tracking points or randomising which pieces you need to use each turn, something that would fall to the players ordinarily. You can preview your moves before committing to them, or save a game in progress to return to later. There's a digital tutorial to teach the game, and there are several different boards to play on for variety - no extra cardboard required.
Aesthetically, Strata looks like something that you'd see in the puzzle pages of a broad sheet newspaper. As with the other games in this launch line-up, it's an effort to define Board as a console for the whole family, and Strata seems to be tailor made to interest the kind of person who doesn't consider themselves a gamer, but who has a Sudoku app on their phone.
Okase
For more dedicated board gamers, there's Okase. Though it was coded by the Board team and other studios, the game was designed by board game design legend Bruno Cathala, whose enviable gameography includes Shadows over Camelot, Cyclades, and Kingdomino. Players take it in turns to pick sushi off a platter, hoping to complete sets to score points.
A regular board game would give you tactile little sushi tokens to pick up, but here you're just moving around a cute pair of chopsticks - how you move it determines which pieces you can claim, and where your opponent starts their turn. Collecting all of one type of sushi unlocks special powers which, Sivak says, would be possible in a tabletop version of the game, but would likely be a nightmare to administer.
It's here that Board's potential for board game development really shines for me. Complex systems and gradually revealed information are hard to implement in board games that rely on cardboard, paper, and tokens to track data, and human grey matter to perform calculations.
Some designers have implemented companion apps to take on some of the load - whether that's keeping adventure information hidden, as in Descent: Legends of the Dark, or tracking masses of information, as in the Gloomhaven app. But these tools inevitably split players' focus between the game and whichever device runs the app. Board is a totally different foundation.
Save the Bloogs
The last game in the demo was Save the Bloogs, the game that Sivak had been working on before I called him. It's similar to the puzzle game Lemmings: a posse of hapless blue Bloogs spawn into the level and start marching across it, and you have to help them reach the exit portal. You do this by placing down playing pieces onto the screen - a set of stairs for them to climb up, a block to halt their progress, a cannon to launch them upscreen. As soon as I saw Sivak place the first piece of stairs, I was enchanted. It's not just intuitive - it's magical.
In my lifetime, the biggest innovations in gaming have come from new control devices. The Wii is the poster child for games consoles achieving mainstream success, and so much of that came from the interface - you just have to waggle a stick. Grandma can do that. Mom and dad can do that. Your four year old nephew can do that. And Board is the most innovative and most accessible new interface I can remember since the original iPhone made touchscreens ubiquitous.
I'll happily entertain arguments about how we should plot the exact balance of innovation against accessibility for the Board, how that compares against VR headsets and Wiimotes, but 'a touch screen with magic toys that come to life' is pretty far up in the top right corner of that graph.
There are other similarities to the Wii. The Wii owes much of its success to Wii Sports, a multiplayer focused game packed in with just about every Wii that was so simple to use and entertaining to watch that it guaranteed the Wii was center stage at every social gathering in a house with a Wii for the first year of its lifespan. That was incredible viral marketing - and Board is intended specifically to facilitate that kind of design.
Board also has massive potential as a games platform for people who would never think of themselves as gamers; historic titles like Wii Fit (22 million lifetime sales) or Brain Age, Train Your Brain in One Minute a Day (19 million lifetime sales) show how colossal that market can be.
Of the launch titles on Board, the virtual escape room Spycraft - which uses a modular set of tools to become a magnifying glass, X-ray, safe cracker, or more - might have the most potential in that regard: market analysts have estimated the escape room industry is worth $23 billion annually. Then there's the virtual pet Mushka - and if you're old enough to remember Tamagotchi or Nintendogs, you know how incredibly popular those can be.
And then there's the potential Board has for hardcore nerds - several kinds of hardcore nerd, in fact. I've already discussed how it could enable new board game designs, and Sivak says there have been early discussions with publishers about porting popular board games to the platform.
With a set of chess pieces and the right software Board could easily become a smart chess board, with move logging, position strength calculations, and tuition for younger players. Some dedicated DnD players already use upended TV sets to display animated maps from virtual tabletop software for in person games, and an actual VTT port to Board could be incredible - there's even Bluetooth to pair with Bluetooth dice.
That's all potential. I've been promised a review sample, and perhaps I will discover it's a buggy mess, badly engineered, or simply less waterproof than advertised. Even if it's incredible, it still needs to reach a critical mass of adopters, and as it's only available in the USA at present, it's going to have to be very successful in that territory to start the ball rolling.
But the promise is tantalizing. It feels like sci-fi - literally like sci-fi. Board reminds me of Star Wars' Holochess, or the civilization game from Iain M. Banks' novel The Player of Games, ideas of what games might become in the future, before those possibilities shook out into the reality of our present. I'll let you know if my illusions are shattered when I get my hands on it.
If you've got thoughts about Board, other smart surface gaming systems, other digitally enhanced board games, I would love them in the Wargamer Discord community.