This New Gaming Console Wants to Replace Your Board Game Collection

A split-screen image showing a hand holding a white, Z-shaped modular block against a blue background with faint

Last month I arrived home from Spiel Essen — the world’s largest tabletop-gaming expo — to find my email and social inboxes filled to the brim with messages from friends and colleagues asking me what I thought about a new gadget that had popped up in their Instagram feed.

That gadget was the austere-sounding Board, a 24-inch touchscreen display that attempts to fuse the digital and tabletop gaming hobbies. The Board aims to bring more face-to-face interactions to the home, using the screen to facilitate a more communal game experience than you might get with a video game and a more expansive experience than you might get with a tabletop game.

“For video games, the screen is the entertainment,” Seth Sivak, Board’s chief creative officer, told me. “For [the Board] the screen is definitely enabling the entertainment, but you have the pieces and looking across at the people.”

The Board launched in October with 11 preloaded games, plus an arcade mode that rotates through four of those. During our testing, two games (Spycraft and Thrasos) were still listed as “coming soon.” Most of the games at launch seem to be family-focused (the Board website says that the age range for the included games is 6 and up), with one or two being a bit more complicated. During our discussion, Sivak told me that Board’s goal isn’t to make simple games or complex ones but games that can be appealing to multiple generations and broadly accessible for gamers of all experience levels.

The current games run the gamut from arcade classics (Space Rocks, an Asteroids clone) to more traditional tabletop games (Strata, a Blokus-style puzzler), and each one is paired with an included set of plastic pieces that players use to interact with the touchscreen during gameplay — think moving a little spaceship around to blast targets or stacking 3D Tetris-like pieces to claim board space.

The Board game console on a wooden table. The screen displays a game menu for "Space Rocks." Scattered around the console are dozens of colorful, tactile game pieces including cubes, figurines, and stylized shapes.
The Board’s screen is vibrant and decently bright. James Austin/NYT Wirecutter

After a few weeks of testing, playing the games by myself and with friends, I won’t be getting rid of any of my board games (or my PlayStation 5) anytime soon.

And I don’t think most people should buy a Board just yet, either.

The tech is cool, and some of the current games are genuinely novel, but until the game library grows, this device is not a great value for most people.

The tech is intriguing, to be sure. Putting pieces onto the screen and watching the digital world react is novel and fun. And some of the games, such as Strata, Chop Chop, and Save the Bloogs, genuinely feel like a new form of play that neither digital games nor tabletop games can quite mimic.

But until it has a much larger and more varied selection of games to play, which the company says is coming, this is a $700 novelty (though discounted to $500 since it launched) that will lose its charm far too quickly to justify the significant expense.



from Wirecutter: Reviews for the Real World https://ift.tt/qstHali
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