Top new technologies to use in Hybrid Games

Hybrid games represent a new world of opportunities for board game designers. With the possibilities that new technologies like mobile or wearable devices - the sky is the limit. In this post we will go though the best examples or these new technologies in board games.

Some of the technologies mentioned below are already being used in board games, others aren't. The one thing we know for sure is that they are going to change the way we play forever.

No. 5: Smart mobile devices

Mobile devices have multitude of uses in enhancing board games. Most of the time they are simply a convenient way to store data or they become a game master, keeper of secrets or multimedia device that boosts immersion.

An example is XCOM: The board game. A game that uses a mobile device that plays against a cooperative team.

No. 4: Controller gadgets

Other devices and controllers have appeared after the boom of mobile phones and tablets. They are usually extensions of the functionality of mobile devices and cannot really do much without them.

Dice+ falls in this category. An electronic dice that connects to the phone and sends information about the rolls.

No. 3: iBeacons

iBeacons are another kind of device that can be used in games. In opposition to controllers like Dice+, iBeacons are passive and they  connect to mobile devices and send information about their localization. The gameplay opportunities that iBeacons offer are very distant from board games but they are still a kind of hybrid game.

There are plenty of companies building iBeacons at the moment like Estimote or Kontakt.

No. 2: Electronic Pawns

This is something completely new in the board game world. Pawns that move themselves and are able to keep track of rules of the game. They also do other fancy stuff depending of the model.

You can check out the ePawn for example. They are trying to kickstart themselves this very moment :)

No.1 1: Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is by far the most convenient way of empowering a board game. It feels nice and powerful. If you think about it, the possibilities of adding 3D objects and procedurally generated content to board games is AMAZING! As we said before, the future for Augmented Reality could not be better now that Hololens are on the way. It can be combined with all the previously mentioned technologies too.

Publish or Perish is a hybrid board game in development that uses Augmented Reality (Developed with Vuforia) to display super fun sub-atomic collider experiments. :)

Do you know any other technology that could be used to build hybrid games? Do you disagree with the order of this list? Do you have any suggestions for future posts? See you soon! :)

Har' to Port! The digital boardgames issue.

When it comes to boardgames one of the crown argument a majority of gamers like to use as a virtue of this kind of entertainment is that it's disconnecting... From the network, that is, from the computers and technology. It's good, ol' fashioned fun with cardboard and wood and plastic. You take the things, and they are exactly as interactive as you can make them with your bare hands. I know this argument well, because I use it myself when praising the glory of boardgaming hobby to the neophytes of this kind of fun! However, even if this argument sounds like a mantra by now, muttered by the hordes of boardgamers, it cannot be a Golden Truth followed by everyone... because if that would be the case, we wouldn't have ports, now, would we?

Just for the sake of clarity - by Ports I mean fully digital versions of a boardgame, usually in form of a mobile app and even full game released on consoles and/or PC. Which kind of make me ask a question...

If the golden value of a boardgame is the fact, that it allow us fun and entertainment without a need for a computer, why the heck Ports not only exists, but are doing pretty gosh darn well?

And they do well, for sure! Just look at the classics. Catan on App Store, the official Settlers of Catan App have over 14 000 reviews, mostly positive. Carcassone got over 10 000 review there and do exactly as well on Google Play Store, both titles also easily finding their way into the category of over 100 000 installations! And when these are most likely most popular titles as they are, by now, known even to the population that would not describe themselves as boardgame geeks, other games - even those dedicated to heavy players! - find their fully digitalized counterpart sooner or later. Agricola, San Juan, Le Havre and even such big, mindburning title as Through the Ages already got or are on their way to become a boardgame turned videogame.

Now, now, just to clarify. I don't think it's a wrong trend... I just point out a curiosity of such growing desire to enjoy your favourite boardgame even without a boardgame. What happened to the 'because it's not a video game' argument? Where it left? Or maybe it never did, but the gamers adapt to the simple and convenient reality, that by now they don't have to carry huge, heavy boxes with them wherever they goes to play their favourite titles, because a simple and lightweight device - such as a tablet - can be a game shelf on its very own?

Well… I don’t have the answer, and frankly, I am not even sure If I should try to dig it out. The fact is, we have them, so why not use them? When I go out of the house I wouldn’t forget to pick my smartphone, my tablet or my Kindle, right? I reckon this is somehow similar to the debacle that Kindles and other e-readers faces when their popularity emerged and surfaces with enough foam to cause some discussion… Like, the classic question:

Are you still a reader, if instead of enjoying a real, printed on paper book you rather read them letters off the digital, e-ink screen? Can you call yourself a true book fanatic, if you prefer to carry a single, lightweight device with your reading collection instead of carrying about a proper tome (Tried it with hardcovers of Song of Fire and Ice books, didn’t work out so well for my shoulder…)?

The little storm of such discussions is still sometimes heard over the vast ocean of the internet, but by now a consensus of some sort was reached, that reading is not defined by how you read and what tools you utilize to do so, but by the mere fact of, well… Reading. No matter if you do it with your first print run of Lord of the Rings, so yellow and tattered it smelled of last century or on a state-of-the-art, slick and slim powerful device that just got released to the shops to the delight of fans of modern gadgetry.

And so, my beloved readers, I will ask you this simple question:

Are we still boardgamers, if we play boardgames in their digital form? Is enjoying Catan or Agricola or Neuroshima Hex on our mobile devices somehow less of an experience? Does it not make it a boardgame anymore, and if no, what define a boardgame?

Just a little food for thoughts, really.

Devil in the device...

Hello there dear readers! This time I will start with a story, bah, even better – A true story! See, we are currently in the middle of developing a new hybrid game and like always, the process of building the game is a constant struggle against obstacles and problems. However our brilliant CTO (Chief Technology Officer, as the title is known in Lingua Corporationis) always manage to bull his way through them, as he is a level 18 Programmer Wizard. However the story below will show you how sometimes you need a person entirely ignorant in the glorious world of code to find an issue and solve it. The educated ones from time to time sometimes simply wouldn’t think of such simple solutions.

In a glorious summer day, not so long ago, our prototype App for a game we are working on was making a lot of problems. Mostly, it had a nasty tendency to crash pretty much on the spot when ran on an Android device.  Of course our coders were able to make quite a fat list of things that can cause that and so, under the enlightened lead of out CTO they began the prowl through the code to find the offensive bug and get rid of it. The journey was long and painful, and no matter what they supposedly fixed, the problem persisted… The app would crash on the Android OS like a plane over Bermuda Triangle and with the same reliability. Bugger.

As the precious hours turned into precious day that passed by without solution and with a lot of stress on entire team our art director – a person entirely and fully ignorant of all the codes and math in the world (and slightly proud of it!) decided to join in the fray. He took the phone. He laughed. He clicked a few things. And handled the device back in the hands of the coders… Voila. App was working smoothly and without any issues. After a few more tests it continued to work well, perplexing the adepts of the binary languages. It turned out solution was just too simple for them to think about it in the first place.

The device was overloaded. In poor shape. In bad condition. Simple as that. App was good from the start and it was crashing simply because our test smartphone had not a bite left in its memory and on its drive and had about half a million (slight exaggeration!) processes running on it. All that had to be done is turn off some of the background apps, clean some space, free the memory usage and everything was working just fine.

Simple, right? And you know what is the moral of today story? It’s not the app. It’s you(r device)! Yes, I played myself with some hybrid games. It comes with the work, really. And I myself had some issues both with XCOM app and the Alchemists, be it issues with recognition of the cards or simply sluggish reaction and ‘laggy’ behaviours. And of course like any user of modern technology, even if fully capable of taking good care of it, I blamed the device. I mean, come on, it should be convenience, not a hindrance! And what If I don’t care well for how much stuff my poor tiny mobile computer have on its shoulders?

It matters, really. And it’s a point of advice that most likely any mobile gamer knows to the core. If the app doesn’t work well, if it crashes, if it slows down, before you fly into a righteous rage about the chunkiness of the application and the shoddy optimisation, be sure to put that hot feeling on the shelf… You can always return to it if the game won’t run well on a cleaned device with free memory to use. Because it just might happen that you won’t have to reach for that rage again, because the game will work just fine if you only give it some space to work with…