Verdict

The Board console offers a genuinely fresh way to play multiplayer videogames - socially, gathered around the screen as if it was a board game. Players interact directly with playing pieces rather than controllers, often with magical results. It's a physical style of play that is particularly well suited for kids and intergenerational gaming, but there's still a good amount for adults to enjoy with friends. While some games can be played single-player, it's a side feature - Board is geared up for multiplayer. The launch line-up has some great titles, and no real duds, but as a new console with a novel control scheme developers may be slow to expand that range. For the right audience this will be sheer magic, but a nontrivial asking price means you should be confident that you are that audience before you buy.

Pros

The most social videogame experience we've ever encountered
Using physical pieces to affect digital worlds is genuinely magical
A genuinely family friendly machine that kids and adults will enjoy
Every launch game is good, and some are genius

Cons

Not a good choice for single-player gaming
Games rely on physical components you could lose
Limited, albeit growing, launch game selection
Physically imposing

It's not often that a new games console hits the market - rarer still for it to be a genuinely innovative product that changes the way people play games. In late 2024 the new 'Board' games console launched softly in North America, with lofty promises: using a hybrid of touchscreen technology and physical playing pieces, this is a videogame that you play socially with family and friends the same way you do a board game; or perhaps it's a system that moves board games beyond cardboard and into a digital realm.

Having received a review sample from the developer Harris Hill Products just after Christmas, and after testing it extensively with friends and family, I can say with genuine delight that it delivers on both promises, and there is something genuinely magical about Board. Whether or not it's right for you is a more complicated question.

I've tested Board on and off since the end of December; with friends; with my daughter; watched other adults playing with it; given complete control to my daughter and her friends to see how they use it. Everyone has found something to love. That said, with Board's current lineup of games, this console offers the most to families. It's a platform for kids to play with friends, siblings to play together, parents to play with children, and the grown-ups to bring out for after-dinner entertainment and during board game night. The console has untapped potential to appeal to a wider audience, but the current iteration succeeds in a narrower space only.

Physically, the board is an utterly colossal touchscreen tablet, with a 24" screen and solid base. It's mains powered, and weighs about as much as a flatscreen TV of the same size - my ten year old daughter can carry it to and from the shelf we've set aside to store it on when not in use, but it's hardly portable. The screen feels very strong, but I dread the day it gets left on the floor and someone steps on it.

Board also comes with a big pack of playing pieces, which are the unique controllers for the system. As well as a regular touch interface for navigating menus and a few interactions in games, Board can detect and identify each playing piece by reading a special conductive 'glyph' inlaid into its base, tracking not just its position, but its orientation as well. The pieces are cute, made from a chunky plastic that appears to be painted. After a lot of handling a little pigment has chipped from the edges of some, like a well-worn action figure.

I suspect there is also a slight production flaw in the glyph of one of my pieces - a pink robot which isn't always fully detected by the games it's used in. Harris Hill offers a replacement part service - it's not clear from the website if this is free, or free when a part fails but paid when a part gets lost - but the problem is avoidable and I wanted to keep testing so I haven't tried to use the service yet. This does highlight an unavoidable vulnerability of this system: not only is there a risk of digital bugs in the code of a game, there's a risk of physical failure. And unlike a board game, you can't just sub in another component or similarly sized Lego brick from the toybox to get by.

Balanced against that, Board's control scheme and tabletop display means it is a vastly more social game experience than even couch co-op multiplayer videogames: players are facing one another, talking, often trading pieces across the table. And there are many advantages to Board being digital that fix problems even the best board games cannot avoid: it takes no time to set up or clear away the game; the game engine can highlight available future moves and predict your score before you commit; there are interactive tutorials; and big as it is, it takes less shelf space than a board game collection.

Like I said, though, this isn't a board game, it's a games console - so let's discuss those games.

Games on Board

Board comes with components for twelve games. Of those, two only became available the literal day that I started to write this review and I haven't tested them, while one is still coming soon. The nine I have been able to test have proven popular with my family and friends, and left my thoughts abuzz with the potential of future releases.

Mushka

Mushka is a simple, gentle virtual pet game that lets you play with a cute dog-moose creature using a selection of plastic toys. Wash Mushka with a watering can! Scrub Mushka with a brush! Use a hair dryer to dry Mushka off, or wind up its night-time carousel! A circular wand can blow bubbles, or lead Mushka through a simple pattern following dancing minigame, or sprinkle sleepdust, while a little bag contains any toys Mushka has collected from the garden.

It's less involved than Nintendogs, and less stressful than a Tamagotchi - a diversion for young children. Discovering interactions between the physical components and Mushka's virtual environment is charming, and something I want to see developed in more advanced games.

Bloogs

Bloogs is Lemmings with a twist. Like the classic game of hapless rodents, your task is to guide the Bloogs across a hazardous level and prevent them from drowning or running into spikes. But instead of clicking on a lemming to give them a job, you have a collection of physical pieces - two stairs, two big bricks, a little cannon, a mysterious circle. Place the stairs onto the map, and voila - the Bloogs start walking up them. Block off a spike pit with a brick, and the Bloogs will turn back from it. Push two bricks together and pull them apart and you'll string a rope between them that the Bloogs bounce off. A Bloog who walks into a cannon is fired in an arc to reach distant platforms.

There are a good sixty levels in Bloogs, and I've hardly scratched the surface. It's the most solitary of the games on Board, as multiplayer simply means giving half the components to a friend. But the interface is joyous: virtual characters reacting to physical pieces is a continual delight.

Board Arcade

Board Arcade is actually a pack of five different games that share the same components, which you can play separately, or in a short "tournament" that rotates through all four. They're all short arcadey fare, adapted for Board's control scheme, with a playtime of about a minute or two each. Some can be played solo or cooperative, but if you're playing in arcade mode you'll play them either head to head or in teams of two. The fifth game, Astro Fort, only became available as I was taking photographs for this review, so I haven't tested it at all yet.

Space Rocks is Asteroids - you move your little triangular space ship across the screen while it shoots continually, collecting green power pellets to charge up a very satisfying laser attack. Snek is Snake - dragging your robot across the screen pulls the snake along behind in a quest to gobble up fruit. Crossing an opponent's tail only loses you points, while crossing your own tail will see you destroyed and reset to a diminutive size. In practise, the main challenge is in navigating your piece around your opponents' elbows.

Cosmic Clash is a match three game - you've got a big grid of squares partially filled with blocks (in this case, aliens) of different colors. Placing your robot onto an alien will push it through the empty spaces until it hits another alien or the wall of the grid. Match three and they'll pop for points, and potentially push the blocks around them off in another direction, maybe even setting off a chain reaction. It takes a little while to click with the control scheme, and there are some nuances I haven't described, but for the most part it's classic match three fun.

The last, and most original, arcade game is Starfire. This uses the ships from Space Rocks, and looks somewhat like air hockey, with both players facing off from opposite long ends of the Board. But instead of trying to clobber a puck, you're shooting pellets at different shapes that spawn in the middle of the field, pushing them towards your opponent's backfield, or trying to slow down a piece your opponent is pelting your way. Your ammo is limited, and when it runs low you need to hoover up fresh pellets by scrubbing your ship over loose pellets lying around on the board. Ultimately it's air hockey with extra steps and more physics, but it works.

The Board Arcade selection is lightweight fare that entertains my daughter and her friends well enough, and is a fun pass-and-play distraction among adults. There's enough variety among the games that a group of kids of different abilities can compete and reasonably expect to have at least one game they're good at. It's simple and accessible fun.

Omakase

Omakase is an original board game from Bruno Cathala, the designer of hit games including Kingdomino, Cyclades, and Shadows over Camelot. It's an abstract two player strategy game themed around sushi. Said sushi pieces are arranged in a hex grid, like the contents of a (very fishy) chocolate box. On your turn you'll move the chopstick shaped controller in a straight line, collecting all the sushi from your path that match the piece you land on. Whoever has the most of a particular type of sushi controls it, and when the game ends, whoever is in control of the most types of sushi wins - failing that, whoever has the most individual pieces.

So the basic strategy is about selecting where to move the chopsticks so you can gain control of a set, while making your opponent's options next turn as weak as possible. But there's a wrinkle - claiming the last piece of sushi in a set opens a special power up, which could be anything from taking another turn, to swapping one of your pieces of sushi with one of your opponent's. The result is a game that's very easy to play, but which rewards you for paying close attention to your opponent's actions.

It's a genuinely great board game, and it really benefits from being digital. Not having to assemble a hexagonal grid of 35 tiles shaves five minutes of setup off a ten to twenty minute game, something my board gaming friends commented on after we rolled straight from one game into a rematch. Then there's quality of life features, like the game highlighting possible legal moves for the chopsticks, or allowing you to 'undo' a special power move before you commit to it.

Those are all features of digital board games in general rather than the Board itself - perhaps digital board games on any sufficiently large tablet would feel just as good. As for the Board implementation specifically, picking up and moving around the chopsticks controller piece feels just as good as deploying meeples or placing tiles in any other board game.

Strata

Strata has been a surprise hit with my daughter and her friends - I initially assumed it was there to sway boring grown ups, because it looks like it comes from the pages of the New York Times. On your turn, the computer will instruct you to collect three specific blocky pieces - think Tetris shapes, only they're made of five blocks instead of four. You'll use these to cover up the grid in an effort to claim spaces, or better yet 'capture' them by completely surrounding them in spaces of your own color. Your options shrink as the game goes on, as you're not allowed to place your blocks onto a captured enemy space, or a black space.

But you can bridge over them. See, you don't have to lie your pentominoes flat on the board - you can stand them up on end. As long as each piece touches one of its neighbours on at least one face, you can assemble them into all sorts of shapes. Some spaces of the board can only be claimed by having a piece above them of a specific height, either two or three blocks high. And if you can create a 'bridge' over a black space, or a claimed or captured enemy space, by making two pieces reach over the gap and meet in the middle, you can claim everything underneath.

One part of the design, which I initially took to be a flaw, is that any move that meets the criteria of legality is permitted, even if the pieces won't balance that way. This means you can find moves that need a player to hold the pieces in place, while another presses the 'confirm' button to lock it in. That struck me as bad design until I saw my daughter and her friend playing the game together, and actively helping one another to create the best possible moves by physically holding the pieces in place.

Chop Chop

Chop Chop is a play kitchen crossed with Overcooked, and it's marvelous. With a selection of ingredients, a selection of cooking stations - cutting boards for chopping, stoves for cooking, plating areas for meal assembly - and a selection of physical tools to interact with it all, it's up to you and as many players as will fit around the board to fulfil the orders of hungry customers, as fast as possible. Don't forget to clean up for that all important cleaning bonus!

There's a free play mode that is, literally, a digital version of a toy kitchen. My daughter and her friends are beyond the point when they would engage with a toy stove, but they'll play Chop Chop in free play mode - perhaps the fact that it's on a digital device, or that it's a little more rules based and a little less purely fantastical, appeals to slightly older kids. The challenge mode, where you need to serve specific orders under a time limit, is something else.

The videogame Overcooked is the obvious comparison - the core premise of performance under pressure is the same. Chop Chop is far more grounded and far more visually simple: you're juggling ingredients, limited cooking stations, and the need to keep everything clean, against the demands of increasingly impatient customers, rather than juggling dishes in an exploding, fantastical kitchen. But that's enough.

Playing it with kids is a delight because holy heck do they get invested; watching kids play it is an utter pleasure. My daughter and her friends spontaneously organize into a working kitchen, dividing responsibilities and tools between them. One of them, somehow, always ends up as a tiny Gordon Ramsey, barking panicked orders that the others obey. As a parent that's delightful - and it's the kind of emergent teamworking behaviour I imagine will make educators sit up and take notes.

And unlike Overcooked, the control system is incredibly simple. Each tool needs to be used a specific way - a chopping motion for the cleaver, a twist for the pepper mill - but that is so much easier to learn to use than a games console controller. Grandparents, little kids, and people who didn't grow up with a games console can all easily join in.

Nitpicks and grumbles

As noted above, I think one of my playing pieces has a slightly busted glyph, and it isn't always detected perfectly. It's one of the four robot pieces for Board Arcade, and can be avoided when playing two player - but a busted Little Chef in Chop Chop could be game breaking. Harris Hill Products offers replacement parts, but I haven't yet tested out the service.

I've noticed a few little hitches in programs. Across multiple play sessions the Board has crashed on two occasions when attempting to launch a game - powering off and on again fixed it on both occasions. In the Board Arcade games, all players need to place their pieces down in specific areas to register them before starting to play, and occasionally the system gets confused and needs you to repeat the process. Both of these seem to be software issues that could be fixed with a software update.

And there's one design choice I think should be changed in all the turn-based multiplayer games. At the moment, the same player always takes the first turn, including when you play several matches back to back. This means players have to get up and physically switch places if they want to swap turn order, which is a needless faff for gamers with mobility issues.

Unrealized potential

A games console is only as good as its exclusives. For Board, I think that the unique mode of play - particularly as exemplified in Chop Chop and Strata - is the key exclusive feature, in the same way that Wii Sports was remarkable more for the joy of waggling a controller than because it was a particularly good videogame. But more games are needed if Board is going to last. As I write this review I have two games downloaded and ready to try; three more full games, plus expansions for both Omakase and Strata, have been teased, and they're part of a promised "10+" new games for 2026. Whether new components join the mix at any point, I don't know.

As noted above, Board as it currently exists will suit families best of all, as it offers a little of everything for all ages, and supports social, intergenerational play - it's just very wholesome. But I can see incredible unrealized potential in it, if it develops the right way.

The Board Arcade has convinced me that this would be a fantastic machine for virtual table games - foosball, pachinko, skeeball, pinball, and so on. Develop that offering, and I can see Board finding a home in dorms, shared houses, and similar communal spaces. At the opposite end of tabletop gaming, adding a smart chess set to Board seems like a complete no-brainer: smart chess boards that connect to online multiplayer and chess rankings websites already have a proven market. Likewise, Board could become a Go table with just a single playing piece.

My experiences with Omakase suggest that it - and perhaps any giant tablet - would be a genuinely great way to play board games. There is already a huge library of board games adapted for Android, and porting them as-is onto Board may actually be quite trivial. Optimizing them is another matter: they've mostly been designed for pass-and-play or online multiplayer, so getting really good versions running on the Board would require rethinking how players will sit around the screen, and how hidden information (like cards in your hand) is displayed. What kind of physical components they could use is another question entirely, which perhaps requires a 'universal component kit' as a starting point for developers.

Lastly, virtual tabletops for RPGs have incredible potential on Board. Some DnD fans already use projectors or televisions to use animated VTTs during in-person DnD games. An adaptation for Board could let playing pieces interact with the virtual scene, like dynamic light sources or triggered scene changes. The conductive glyphs that Board uses to detect pieces could fit into the bases for gaming miniatures, making it quite simple for players to connect their existing model collections directly with the VTT.

Price comparison

I'm writing this review on the very last day that Board is being sold at the Founders Edition discount - when you read this, it will cost $599. It's only on sale in the United States, so expect to add import duties if you're based overseas. A Nintendo Switch 2 with Mariokart will set you back $500 - it's possible for two players to play that game with the tiny joycon controllers and the inbuilt screen, but for a comfortable setup and more players you'll need access to a television and extra controllers, which retail from $50 to $90 each depending if you want first or third party products.

Board and the Switch 2 are offering fundamentally different experiences, but the prices are similar, depending on how you're accounting for that TV screen, and if you want a large number of people to play with the console at once. If you're buying a console for exactly one person, the Switch 2 is absolutely the correct choice, as the Board simply is not designed as a single-player machine. If you're buying a console for multiple children, or for the whole a family, that's a conversation - I think the Board enables a kind of play that simply isn't possible on tablets, handhelds, or television-based games consoles.

Final thoughts

Board has passed the most important test I can run on any family entertainment system - the novelty has worn off, and my ten year old daughter still wants to play with it. She asks to play a variety of the games on it with me, and she gets it out when her friends visit. She's played with kids as young as seven and as old as twelve - and with a variety of grown-ups. And I've played it with my board gaming group, who enjoy it just as well as a board game.

Board has some genuinely very good games on it: Omakase, Strata, and Chop Chop are all excellent, while the rest are solid games elevated by their unique control interface. It's a package that offers something for all ages, though it is weighted towards a family audience. While Chop Chop and The Bloogs have videogame-style levels, most of what's on offer is more like a board or arcade game, something with limited content but such fun core gameplay that you can replay it again and again. The escape room mystery Spycraft and fifth arcade game Astro Fort promise a little extra, but they've arrived too late to test - and although I have the pieces for the strategy game Thrassos, it's still marked as "coming soon" in the console menu.

What most impresses me is how well Board delivers on its central marketing promise: social gaming. You interact with Board like a board game, around a table, talking with your friends and family. Every videogame console marketing campaign shows gaggles of friends in the same room playing with a console and laughing, in the same way that an instant ramen packet might have a Kung Po chicken bowl on the front next to the disclaimer 'serving suggestion'. With Board, in person social play is everything.

The sheer potential of the Board also dazzles me. Like VR headsets, I don't see this replacing any existing technology, but it could carve out a niche in the gaming market for genuinely original games that just wouldn't work anywhere else. Of course, you shouldn't buy a console on potential alone. But what's in the box with Board is already a solid offer for the asking price. If you can afford it and you're genuinely intrigued, I say go for it.

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