CMON and Xplored Announce New Digital Board Game Console

Yeah, them newfangled horseless carriages will never work.

Some of you folks going to Gencon should go look at it and report back.

RobertB wrote: Yeah, them newfangled horseless carriages will never work.

Some of you folks going to Gencon should go look at it and report back.

I think the eventually successful version of this looks a lot more like an expanded tabletop simulator, perhaps with some VR-ish hardware. I'm still very skeptical that mobile platforms haven't already solved this problem for the market that wants digital board games.

Vysetron wrote: Remember Golem Arcana?

No.

Okay, so, here's the thing. This is the antithesis of modern design. The whole damn world is trying to get away from dedicated hardware. This is dead on arrival because you just can't tool for something like this game after game. Modern manufacturing won't deal well with this. And I'll tell you what -- purchasing version 1.0 of the hardware for this thing should be considered a charitable donation at tax time.

Here's the bigger truth -- you can do every damn thing that this huge hardware package is trying to do with a couple of smartphones on tripods. You can image process damn near everything with a couple of angles of view, and I'd wager 80% of games played today have two smartphones within a couple of feet of them. Zero hardware purchase, same capabilities.

Don't believe me? There's a guy in Russia that just released a scoring app for Ticket to Ride (original and Europe) where all you do is photograph the board at the end of the game. All routes are totaled and scored, longest route, it asks each player for their Destination Tickets with their most likely tickets listed first, based on the positions of their pieces on the board. One photograph.

That was literally one young guy in his bedroom doing the programming, and he's releasing it at no charge. Sure it's sending your location to the GRU, but they probably have it already. The damn thing works, based off of one photograph! It's pretty damn impressive.

A game company could sell a cardboard game, and an app that comes with it and replicate 100% of the functionality of this exceptionally complicated set of hardware components. If they're crazy CMON will release a first game using it. That's as far as it will ever go, and sure as hell no other game manufacturer is going to license it.

The day someone releases an SDK for vision-enhanced-gaming software the market changes.

But dude, it makes a sound when you open a door.

Michael Barnes wrote: But dude, it makes a sound when you open a door.

You know, that promo video was hokey as hell. I particularly liked the animation of the electricity zooming up the dedicated wire between the space on the board and the cpu. And the explosion diagrams with the battery and the usb ports labeled.

What pisses me off about that trailer is that they blew a perfectly good opportunity to use the Alan Parsons Project song “Sirius”.

Please be the thing that finally kills CMoN.

So I'll be one of the dissenting voices and say that I typically like apps who play the "overlord" to let me and my kids play co-op. It works for us in Imperial Assault and it works with X-COM.

IA however works as three different games in one. A 1 vs 4 campaign, a 1v1 skirmish, and a app vs 4 campaign. But with this I have to ask why? From what I can tell this does exactly what the Imperial Assault app does (translate pre-programmed cards into actions for the monsters, and trigger events). So why does this need to be a full console? Hell the IA app is FREE.

Great question, and if you read the promotional materials it appears that a hardware company showed up at their door and presented them with the idea. That is, CMoN is a partner in another company's product.

Sagrilarus wrote: Great question, and if you read the promotional materials it appears that a hardware company showed up at their door and presented them with the idea. That is, CMoN is a partner in another company's product.

Interesting, so like a group of geeky grad student EE majors that developed the sensor mat and tried to spin up their own business? Makes sense as that is the age group for a game like Zombicide.

In that case the best to them, even if I'm not interested. I'm not sure that a full console with a hand held for each character and a single use tablet CPU is the way to go on this. Better for them to develop the sensor mat and pair it with a USB connector so that folks could connect their (already owned) laptop or Android.

And if you have to pair each sensor with what it is in the game it's going to flop. I'll stick with IA. I have no problems perusing character sheets, tracking wounds, and tapping inventory and skill cards.

However I could see this as a replacement for the massive kickstarters out there. Gloomhaven, Shadows over Brimstone, etc. Just not Zombicide.

Looking up Xplored seems to indicate their partners are these guys --

"Xplored is a game development team based in Italy specialized in flashgames, advergames and 3D real-time solutions."

"3D real-time solutions" appears to be a reference to running First Person Shooters in Flash. It's in the company's news feed.

That would appear to be the partner, but it's hard to tell. Xplored's news link says nothing about CMoN, so I may have the wrong crowd.

Update -- here's Teburu from their page -- www.xplored.com/2014/teburu/ . My Italian isn't the best but the text looks like pretty standard ad copy. Video is the same and CMoN is i deed mentioned there.

Thought folk might be interested in this twitter thread. It's from one of the folks involved in Beasts of Balance so they know what they are talking about when it comes to hardware integration.

Twitter Thread

Awesome link