Has Apple Created the Perfect Board Game Platform?

andylim writes "recombu.com is running an interesting piece about how Apple has created a 'Jumanji (board game) platform.' The 9.7-inch multi-touch screen is perfect for playing board games at home, and you could use Wi-Fi or 3G to play against other people when you're on your own. What would be really interesting is if you could pair the iPad with iPhones, 'Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so that no one else could see your letters and when you were ready to make a word on the Scrabble iPad board, you could slide them on to the board by flicking the word tiles off your iPhone.' Now that would be cool."

Comments

solution in search of a problem

[roman_mir]

isn't that solution in search of a problem? Isn't the 'perfect' board game platform based on an actual physical board with physical elements present: cards, dice, tokens, whatever?

I used to play a board game similar to Risk, that had tokens, little standing cards, the value of which were only visible to me. So you have an army and the opponent has an army, you see various soldiers, but you don't know what they are. Some tokens are soldiers, some are mines, there is one that is the flag. The idea is to capture the flag by 'attacking' it. When one player attacks the other, he challenges the opponent's token soldier with his own. Now the soldiers are compared, if one has a higher rank, he wins, the opponent's token is removed. If both are the same rank, both are removed.

How do you do something like that on a screen? Do you put the actual tokens on the screen? Why not just a piece of cheap ass cardboard with a picture on it?

This is amusing, maybe there are instances where this horizontal touch screen is better for some games, but really? How much does it cost compared with a few cardboard pieces?

And here is what Apple does marvelously!

[rehtonAesoohC]

I have karma to burn, so what the hey.

Apple doesn't create innovative products anymore. They've created a platform where they shift the onus of innovation onto their userbase, and then hope that people submit ideas and apps that are innovative, thereby reaping the benefit. Fairly genius move actually, but it reminds me of one of the best comedic movies ever: Tommy Boy.

If you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will - I got spare time...

Everyone, buy an iPad so we can all keep eating shit in a box from Apple!

Here's a *CLASSIC* comment from the article....

[pandrijeczko]

and because the iPad is a computer it can store thousands of games and add a variety of interactive features.

This is a great example of typical Fanboi "engage brain before mouth" syndrome. Let's look at this statement at bit more...

Firstly, it doesn't support Flash so you can't download and play the thousands of Flash games on the Internet.

Secondly, Apple doesn't make emulators available on the Apple store because of copyright restrictions - therefore there's no way of playing NES, Amiga, MAME or any other game ROMs on it, most of which would be tiny in size.

Thirdly, the biggest iPAD is 64GB which means that to get a "thousand" games on it, each game would need to average no more than 65MB.

Okay, I guess that's possible from a storage perspective, but how will that work from a UI perspective?

If each game has its own icon to select in order to play it, how many screens are you going to need to need to scroll through to get to one of the last games in your list of "thousands". Does the UI actually *SUPPORT* having that many screens of icons?

The author's comments just make NO sense...