Sifteo!

[Dannyalcatraz]

Saw these on CNN: https://www.sifteo.com/

They showed, among other things, kids shifting the cubes to make their pieces in some game follow some maze...so I thought

THIS IS THE FUTURE OF GAMING!

OK, they're still too expensive- $45 per cube after the initial set- but that will change.

But imagine, instead of a battlemat, minis and markers, you have a set of these things that you can shift at will. No erasing. No attempting to erase what you thought was eraseable. No need for minis (and I LIKE minis).

The map resides on your computer and gets rendered in full color on your table...

 

[Umbran]

The map resides on your computer and gets rendered in full color on your table...

I don't see how those little cubes replace my battlemap - I'd need a bazillion of them to do the job.

Those cubes could replace the minis, sure, but I'd still need something (that the cubes interact with, I expect) to be the map.

 

[Dannager]

They showed, among other things, kids shifting the cubes to make their pieces in some game follow some maze...so I thought

THIS IS THE FUTURE OF GAMING!

I think the evolution of "tabletop" gaming is probably in two not-necessarily-divergent directions: online play, and digital surface play.

RPGs have solidly hit the digital age in the last five years or so, and we're already seeing some novel developments on both fronts. WotC has embraced the idea of online play through an official virtual tabletop app, and last year we saw a team of students at Carnegie Mellon develop a program that let them play functional 4e (including most rules adjudication) on a Microsoft Surface table. Moving forward, we can expect to see more online play almost immediately, and digital surface play will become its own movement once Surface-like tables reach an affordable price point (Surface 2 is half the price of the original Surface - and is way more sophisticated - so it'll only be a couple of generations before this technology is within the reach of your average consumer).

I think that trying to use a technology like Sifteo to run tabletop gaming is really stretching the tech outside of its ideal design area (especially since, in its current incarnation, six cubes is the maximum you can use, giving you, at most, a chopped up 3"-by-4.5" screen; any tablet would be a better option). The technologies I describe above are already flexible enough to facilitate tabletop gaming, and they do it well (I played around with the Surfacescapes D&D app at PAX East last year, and it was an eye-opening experience).

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I don't see how those little cubes replace my battlemap - I'd need a bazillion of them to do the job.

Those cubes could replace the minis, sure, but I'd still need something (that the cubes interact with, I expect) to be the map.

Yeah- you'd need a few hundred, which at the current price is too much- but over (a lot of) time, that unit price will fall.

As for the interaction, the map and things on it are all depicted on the cubes. On the CNN story, the kids had some little videogame sprites navigating a maze. As one kid moved a cube, that portion of the maze would pop up, and you could move the sprites into that new section...just like players moving minis on a freshly drawn section of a map.

 

[Rhun]

Pretty cool stuff! I personally am looking forward to the day we are all using digital battlemaps!

 

[Mark CMG]

Interesting. It will be neat to follow along as they develop further.

 

[Scott DeWar]

Interesting. It will be neat to follow along as they develop further.

I would say especially for you as you are a game designer!