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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."
The perfect board game platform is cardboard.
Living With a Nerd
So for only $499 + $299/phone, you can play a $75 board game electronically! No messy setup, and you don't have to worry about where to put that almost $1000 in cash you would still have!
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
TOO SMALL!
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
How is less than 10 inches perfect?
I don't think I play a single board game with a board that small. Zoom in and out? Scroll around? Everything smaller? No thanks. A lot of my board game time is great just because I'm unplugged anyway.
If I were alone, maybe then I could see it. The less than ideal experience would be o.k. compared to not being able to play at all. But to sit around with phones out to 'hold' tiles and play the game on a little screen doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
get some cardboard, draw on it
man was that cheap.
now go pay apple
yup. This is just an attempt by apple to make this appealing. The answer is: it's not. There are other apple products more compelling at this price, iphone namely.
I'd hope a $1600 game of scrabble would be cool.
...to "Ramming home the news that Apple have released a new product this week, Part 234".
Thanks.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Well, heavy cardboard wrapped in a plastic-like material...but you get my point.
-1 for replying to myself.
Living With a Nerd
Or I could play a board game. I could buy all sorts of board games before I would come close to the price of the iPad + digital board game purchases.
Problem is most "cardboard" games are getting nutty pricey. I have seen many new ones retailing for $100 or more.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Or, you know, you could get an actual Scrabble board, and not have to spend a couple thousand dollars to play to play a $20 game with three friends. You can even flick the tiles at the board, if you want. For free!
No... the "big ass table" that apple fans made fun of Microsoft for is the perfect board game platform.
The iPad would maybe make a nice "private" board for keeping player information hidden. But a big ass table would be a lot better for a group to gather around to play a board game.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Cardboard with OLED.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
'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.'
I'm imagining a large amount of wasted money for people who don't have at least one of the components...and if everyone has to be present anyway, why not just use a regulate board? Costs to develop the thing would be pointless as well.
Just seems like a bad example...
The most expensive "board" game (i.e. NOT a tabletop game) that I have bought was Hero Quest. It was worth every penny.
I dunno...I mean, i could see how SOME board games might work ok on an iPad, and I could definitely see board games made specifically for it...but, much like reading digital comics isn't quite teh same as the real thing...
Living With a Nerd
I can see people having fun with board games on the iPad but I'm not sure it really trumps a real board game. Most board games aren't overly expensive as it is.
But what I do think the iPad could be really good at is custom audio controller interfaces. More and more of these interfaces are starting to show up on computers, but much of the mouse/keyboard input doesn't really match the real life use of tweaking knobs and levers. Multi-touch on a larger screen is a much better translation of this, and given how much physical audio controllers can cost, a few software reproductions of them could end up being a cost benefit for users.
Board games come with cards, dice, plastic & metal things and usually need more space than a small rectangle. Perhaps it does allow decent simulations of board games, but at $499 (+ whatever the app store slaps on top for a game) it bloody well ought to.
So for only $499 + $299/phone, you can play a $75 board game electronically!
That depends on how many board games you buy. If you buy specialty board games as apps on iTunes Store, it might be cheaper than buying them as cardboard on, say, MyAtomic.com. Notice how albums cost $9.99 on iTunes Store vs. $13.99 on CD at Walmart* because there's no cost of pressing, packaging, shipping, and retailing discs.
but we didn't know the problem. Thanks for providing the problem
Or you could read a book. You could buy all sorts of books before you would come close to the price of the iPad + e-book purchases.
Or you could listen to a CD. You could buy all sorts of CDs before you would come close to the price of the iPad + .MP3/AAC/whatever purchases.
Or you could watch a movie. You could buy all sorts of DVDs before you would come close to the price of the iPad + digital video purchases.
Funny thing is, a large and growing number of us have small music players, e-book readers, watch movies/TV on our laptops, play assorted multi-player games, etc. - all on hardware comparable in price to the iPad.
Between a convenient play-everything device and some bulk storage to off-load under-used content, those of us realizing it's 2010 already LIKE the idea of replacing boxfulls of atoms with a few cubic inches of bits.
Always amazes me how many /.ers exhibit Luddite tendencies.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
How much does it cost compared with a few cardboard pieces?
That depends on how many board games you buy. It's similar to the value proposition with Kindle or Nook or any other e-book reader.
Part of the magic of meatspace board games is losing the bits and pieces.
You can't do that on an iPad.
But, seriously, implementing board games well on a computer demands a lot more than a small touch-sensitive display. Simple non-social games are easier, but they work just fine on a traditional PC.
Race For The Galaxy + 2 expansions was in that neighborhood or higher.
Euros trend expensive.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Ha, now I remember, it's called Stratego.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
Wasn't this in Back to the Future Part 2...along with all the other ridiculous, and pointless, "this is what we will have in the future" crap in that film.
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.
Are you talking about Stratego?
Jean-Francois Im's blog
You must be describing Stratego? Great game! :D
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
So I have the choice of a buying a 10 dollar board game or spending thousands in on iPads and iPhones. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this one out.
They're just desperate to find SOMETHING it'd good for.
The perfect board game platform is cardboard.
And cardboard games don't come with DRM or restrictive rights where you don't actaully 'own' it, rather rent it and rebuy it when you magically lose the rights to the game. No thanks.
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
But an eBook reader really provides convenience of having so many books in one single package that you can take anywhere and read. This pad as a board game, well, wouldn't you still have to at least bring various other game pieces with you, unless of-course, they all can be digital?
Also, you know, you can gift board games to people, and it's not going to make you bankrupt.
You can't handle the truth.
Well with ebook readers they typically charge MORE for an ebook than an actual paperback. So your argument would be valid as long as the game apps cost less than the actual boardgame.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
So what do you do with your cardboard monopoly or chess board when you are half way through a game and the captain says to return to your seats, place the tray tables in the upright locked position and prepare for landing? I guess it's game over.
With an iPad, you could save the game, put it back in your hand luggage, then get it out and resume the game in the taxi to the hotel.
I agree with the article. I think the iPad presents a great opportunity to play board games with friends in a more convenient way.
What board games are you buying and where are you shopping? Last time I checked Scrabble and Monopoly were still in the sub-20 dollar range. Even Axis and Allies is 40-50 bucks. Even if they were 100 bucks you could buy 10-20 of them for the cost of an iPad and 3 iPhones.
I don't think it's a replacement for a multiplayer board game; the Family Game Night is in no danger But it would make a great platform for me to sit in my barcalounger and play Magic or Bloodbowl or Axis & Allies against my friends on the other side of the country. It's small enough to be portable and comfortable, but large enough to visualize the playfield manipulate the playing pieces. Smack talk would be a lot easier with a webcam, tho.
Save the Music; Save the World at http://www.TuneTriever.com (Our latest Android game)
i just bought stratego and monopoly from target. they came in a wood box. all quality parts. $19.99.
The iPad is larger than many chess travel sets I've seen. Plus it can incorporate timers, single player, tutorials, ... I think its a little premature to rule it out for board game like use, especially when considering being on the move. Not only compared to travel sets but consider that you can effectively be carrying around multiple board games all the time.
--
Perpenso Calc for iPhone and iPod touch, scientific and bill/tip calculator, fractions, complex numbers, RPN
I'm already at +5 Insightful! I can't wait to tell my wife, ACTION FOR SURE!
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Stratego. I assume that you are talking about this game. And yes impossible to play without 2 individual and private screens. Because you have to watch the other player move, and still be able to see all your pieces.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
Those expensive board games are not exactly Candy Land or Monopoly. My most expensive game is StarCraft: The Board Game which retails for $80 and after you add in the Brood War expansion, I'm out over $100 for that game, but it is worth every bit of it. I admit that I was hesitant at first to spend that much on game when my most expensive board game prior to that was maybe $10-$20. You get a whole lot in the game in terms of tokens, miniatures, cards, etc all very high quality, not to mention many, many hours of fun playing. It's always a blast to get 5 of your friends around the game for an epic 3-4 hour war where everyone has a great time.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
p>They forgot that laptops and netbooks already exist and are more versatile. So what you have is a turkey of a device. Crippled and limited. It's best use will be providing competition. Expect to see new laptops with accelerometers and perhaps touch screens built in. Apart from those two features and the ability to run iPhone apps, the iPad has NO advantages over a common laptop or netbook. As one reviewer said, it's an oversized iPhone without the phone.
"No advantages"? Hmm, let's see... add that nifty touchscreen and accelerometer to your netbook and you STILL have essentially a desktop form factor that's been shrunk down and then joined together with a hinge. Change the screen orientation? Nope. In addition, to keep costs down, you probably have a very poor off-angle viewing experience. Share the device with someone next to you? More like sharing a pair of binoculars than sharing photos. And that keyboard's SO useful while reading emails, browsing web pages, working on your calendar, working with photos, checking your stock prices, ...
It's not your desktop computer -- or even your portable desktop computer (laptop, netbook). Since you cannot realize that, it has no advantages for you.
Yeah, rich people with tons of cash to burn who care more about technology than connecting with family would see this as a great board game platform. The rest of us will continue to enjoy the company of our friends and family with decidedly low-tech but perfectly useful cardboard, and focus more on the interactions and fun than the tech and "ooh ahh" factor.
This is really stretching. It seems people are going to obscene lengths to try to make the iPad look less ho-hum that it really is.
Apple really failed on this one, HARD.
Although this will more likely be more expensive, it's a much better platform for games like that because of the larger screen. You can still use the iPad or iPhones for tossing out tiles though. I imagine the iPads would be better for that since they're a larger screen then the phones.
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/Pages/Product/WhatIs.aspx
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
A Catan board costs over $33, while the Xbox 360 version costs $10.
a 600$ board game! what fun! give me a break. reaching..really reaching.
But how does that compare to paying $9.99 each from the app store (and probably 99 cents for each player) and about $700 for the board and $200 for each player...
but have MULTI-TOUCH!!!
Ummm, yeah. That's my take on it too.
The iPad just isn't selling itself to me yet. Maybe the iPad 3Gs Pro.
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
This reminds me of the horrifying carnage of the train wreck that was the GameCube + GBA link cable.
Remember Metroid Prime - you could get some bonus by just connecting Metroid Fusion. And Animal Crossing - just some minigame (again with a bonus incentive) that could easily be presented on the TV instead of on the GBA. Wind Waker - useless except for the ultra-die-hard 100% complete players. Four Swords Adventures or Crystal Chronicles? Yeah, go buy four GBAs, four GameCube link cables, plus the game itself. I bet like Nintendo Apple can't imagine how out of a set of four people one of them could not use an iPhone.
Forgive me for being skeptical.
Runewars $99.95
It certainly wouldn't be worth $500, but if there was a way to get the computer to recognize letter tiles, you could use the computer to save games, and to look back through games for strategic errors and such (by the end of the game, the computer would even know when each tile was actually drawn).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
NO
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
yup. This is just an attempt by apple to make this appealing.
I didn't realize recombu.com was owned by Apple.
The answer is: it's not.
Oh, I disagree. I find it very compelling, and I suspect most people will as well, after using one for only a few moments. Whether that will translate into a sale ($499 is cheap for this type of product, but still a good chunk of cash) is yet to be determined.
The problem right now is the geeks are looking at specs and keywords (multitasking? iPhone OS? No stylus? No e-ink?) and disliking the iPad that they imagine based on that. The trick with Apple is that their products are rarely what a geek-mind would imagine based on the specs. Apple doesn't look at making a product to meet some technological specs, they design them to end-user goals.
That may not be your cup of tea. You, as a geek-type end-user definitely have different needs and wants than the standard person. So sure, this may not be compelling to you, and just like with the iPhone, since most people haven't used an iPad, they are listening to the geek-minded criticism (valid criticisms, to be sure, but not valid in relation to how most people will feel about this product), causing their imaginations are leading them astray.
There are other apple products more compelling at this price, iphone namely.
This isn't an iPhone. It's won't directly compete against the iPhone. The iPhone is a phone. The iPad isn't. You won't automatically exclude buying one because you bought the other.
As for a direct comparison between it and the iPhone (or more reasonably, an imaginary 3G data iPod touch), I think the iPad offers a lot in terms of the much larger display. This won't just be a "big iPhone". Unlike a PC or Mac where larger screen and higher resolution simply means you can have larger windows, or more windows side-by-side, or whatever, software for the iPad will not simply be iPhone software scaled up (although that is one of the ways to use it), but will have software written with the larger screen in mind. Just look at the difference between the included apps on the iPad and the iPhone. Also, imagine doing something like the iWork apps on an iPhone! On the iPhone it would be something that, technically you could do, in a pinch, if needed. But on the iPad, the process looks actually enjoyable.
In a lot of ways, the iPad isn't a big iPhone so much as the iPhone is a small iPad. Specifically in the sense that iPhone apps are pared down iPad apps more than iPad apps will just be zoomed in iPhone apps.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is why it's a fun product. Apple didn't show half, or a quarter or even 10% of the potential on Wednesday of this device.
Except moving electronic representations of physical disks is not the same as sliding real disks over a real table.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
If they talk about "perfect board games" and then mention Scrabble, then
THEY DO NOT KNOW A FUCKING THING ABOUT BOARD GAMES.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
And you don't need Apple's (or anyone's) permission to play it.
Disclaimer: I am not questioning your opinion, nor am I discrediting it. You are completely entitled to your own thoughts.
No matter what you do, say, or show me, you will never convince me that buying a device as expensive as a full computer but with only half the functionality is a good thing. Paying more and getting less is not a good thing, even if it comes wrapped up in a pretty package.
Living With a Nerd
Sorry-- the iPad is a netbook wanna be with a business plan that aids Apple. It has a nice touchscreen, it's flat, and it connects to stuff. It's incapable of multi-task, multi-thread and uses nifty little programlettes from the iPhone. Well, iPhoey.
iSorry. iThe iPad iS iSimply iNot iThe iUltimate iGame iPlaying iPlatform.
Your Jedi Knight drivel changes nothing.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The value-add of a Kindle or a Nook is the number of books you can carry, not the cost per se. As long as the cost and reading experience is close, they are useful just for that. (And, arguably, they improve on a paper book in some ways, without many new downsides.)
I can see the value of interactivity here, but I don't seen the iPad as all that good at adding that value. A cheaper, larger device would work better. (As would one not locked down by the manufacturer, so that it's easier to get new games on to it.) Plus I don't see that level of interactivity as being all that great a value: It's basically a gimmick, and it's cheaper to use cutouts or die-casts, which will work almost as well for most uses.
Being able to play a game of chess against someone on another continent would be something people would pay for, but you can already do that with a laptop or a desktop. (And I wouldn't be surprised if there were dedicated devices.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Seriously - what has Apple "created"? You do know the concept of a Tablet PC was around for a long, long time before Apple "invented" the shit out of it.
To be fair, you should compare it to a PSP or DS. In which case the CPU is fine, but the device is bulky, and has a very limited scope in the ways you can interact with a game. At best it's a mediocre board game platform, any game that requires any form of privacy (scrabble is a good example) is solved by adding extra devices. You could network them, but really, the point of board games is to be social, any get-together where people say "hey let's play monopoly" and everyone just pulls out their iPad finds a seat and starts clicking away is not a success.
Even Agricola with its insane amount of material was about 40€ IIRC (may have been 30), what exactly are you buying, gold plated Monopoly? Some game with a novelty electronic thing like a card thrower?
Speaking of Agricola, I don't think that'd work well on the iPad if you wanted more than one player on the device.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Seriously? I hate to point out the elephant in the room, but the back on this thing is CURVED. This means that laying it flat on a table for board games is pretty much impossible. Any time you press the device while it's laying on its back, you'll make the device jump around....
I agree with the article. I think the iPad presents a great opportunity to play board games with friends in a more convenient way.
I also agree. I mean, who cares if the low end model only costs $500 and you are restricted to appstore applications? And who needs multitasking support? ::chuckle:: Do people actually use AIM and Safari at the same time? Pfft! I mean, come on...who wouldn't pay the price of a full computer for something that offers half the functionality.
Wait...what?
Living With a Nerd
Most people who play board games really don't sit around and play Scrabble and Monopoly all the time.
They play games like:
Settlers of Catan
Power Grid
Runewars
Puerto Rico
Dominion
etc
All of those are not cheap at all.
The troll with karma.
Mass produced games are around that price, but wander around a specialty game store. Many (not all) of the games there will be quite expensive. E.g. Settlers of Catan lists for $50, though you can get it for the low-to-mid $30s.
You also need all the small bits to go with it. Playing a board game on the computer is nothing like the real thing. Moving pieces, holding cards, rolling dice. The tactile part of playing a board game is a huge part of the game. Using all those things is also part of the strategy. Want them to know your loaded? Show your cash/resources. Want to look like you are down and out? Hide or minimize your stash.
Playing on a computer works fine when I play by myself, but when I play with friends, I want to crack open a box, set up the game, talk a little trash and flaunt my moves to make it more fun.
I know this isn't practical for a lot of people, but we have a small area designated for board games (usually, there is a Hero Quest game in progress. We modified it to makea Hero Quest/DnD hybrid, works great.)
All joking aside, I know what the article is getting at (board games being just another reason to buy the thing). Of course, it is worth mentioning that you will be restricted to whatever Apple approves to go in the Appstore...whereas something like the Asus T91MT would cost the same (or less) and be completely unrestricted.
It doesn't look as pretty, but it would still serve the same purpose...just with more functionality.
Living With a Nerd
Ugg, I'm getting tired of hearing this misunderstanding. The iPhone OS is completely, 100% capable of full multitasking and uses multithreading extensively. Apple has chosen to restrict most of its own and all 3rd party applications to run only 1 at a time. Several built-in applications run in the background instead of exiting, such as Safari, Mail and the Phone applications. I do not agree with their decision to do this, however, but understand why they did. In a way, though, I should be thankful that so many people are complaining about this, even not entirely accurately, since I think the negative publicity might be enough to push Apple to change this. Apple isn't completely immune to consumer pressure.
In fact, everything YOU mentioned are things that Apple may or may not approve.
My point was just that looking at it as a "board game player" is silly and unrealistic.
Particularly with the whole "ooooh then you can link the iPhones to it!" line of reasoning - now everyone who comes over to my place to play games needs some sort of smart phone? Lots of my friends are broke mofos.
I wouldn't trust any closed device as my content repository; too much about copyright is nebulous right now to trust any company to "look out for my interests" which is where Apple leaves you - Trust Me, Steve says.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
> The perfect board game platform is cardboard.
No, it isn't. Not for all situations. The iPad is a bit pricey at the moment but in the future when they're cheaper (and/or used) I could see this actually being quite good for the kids to play checkers in the backseat of the car or on a flight.
1) No pieces to lose
2) Bored of checkers? It can hold a few hundred other games.
3) Related to #1: also no pencils/pens/crayons floating around/getting lost/poking people in tender places
Honestly, I'd rather have the kids in the backseat playing games instead of watching movies the whole time.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
From my perspective, owning an iPhone, the iPad is just 'meh' for me. I like the bigger display, but I work from home (telecommute), so I've already got a 27" screen for big stuff, and my iPhone for mobile work. No real need for anything in between.
That said, pop an extra $250 bucks, and you get kindle capabilities + everything that the iPhone offers (sans the voice cell capabilities), meaning music, video, games, apps, location tools/utilities, etc. To my mind, that at least makes for an interesting combination. I think it's largest market will be in games, and books, and maybe a smattering of video and movies for those folks on the go (travelers or mobile babysitters to keep occupied on long trips). If board games become a common app for this, instead of paying $20-$99 bucks for them, you could easily end up with a $5-$10 dollar app store equivalent. Buy more than a few, and you've paid for your investment.
It's just a more versatile than a piece of cardboard.
Will I buy one? No (see above for 'meh' factor). I just don't have a need for it, but I can see the appeal.
obviously, you store your collection of 327 musty old boardgames on the shelves in the basement, next to your bed.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So what do you do with your cardboard monopoly or chess board when you are half way through a game and the captain says to return to your seats, place the tray tables in the upright locked position and prepare for landing? I guess it's game over.
You could use the time between when you drop below 10,000 ft (when you have to put away your iPad) and when you're on immediate approach and have to put up the tray tables to record the configuration of the game. ;-)
(Not arguing that there's a convenience factor with the iPad, but it's not all win. For instance, you could even keep going with many games even after the tray tables have to go up. I'd guess that with something like this you could get around 30 minutes more playing time -- and even that could be low if you're stuck in a holding pattern below 10K feet or even spend a ton of time on the taxyways -- each flight than you could with an iPad simply due to legal constraints on when you can use electronic devices.)
I haven't been able to let go of it since puberty
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
1) You've been able to change the screen orientation of a laptop for a very long time. Not the keyboard.
2) A real keyboard is very useful while REPLYING to email
3) Never had a problem showing photos on a laptop. Don't know what you're on about with that binocular comment.
There's a reason I like my full sized laptop. I can do everything I want with it including play games(including reaslistic flight sims and chess since I have decent mobile graphics), watch movies, read and reply to email, browse the web, edit documents, run a development environment, view and edit photos, attach many devices, run CPU/FPU intensive math software, burn a DVD or CD. I can't do half of that with an iPad.
I would love a touch screen and an accelerometer. (interestingly I could add them to my laptop, it would just be expensive and a little awkward). If my laptop hinged differently so I could hide the keyboard sometimes that would be a small plus. But I won't swap those things for my DVD drive, USB ports, processing power and ability to install whatever I like. I won't even downgrade to a netbook.
Steve Jobs can keep his little fashion statement.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
The author wanted to see how much nerd rage they could whip up.
You're missing the point. No one is trying to convince you that it's a good thing. You have made up your mind, and that's cool. The point is, your opinion isn't necessarily all that meaningful in the context of the use cases of this device.
Thank you for speaking on behalf of me when I've never played any of those games. You know what I do like to play though? Scrabble and Monopoly. But then again, I don't "sit around" playing board games, they're more of a last resort kind of thing.
Exactly. If my aim was to "easily revive board game culture and introduce new generations to classic family games", then I'd got to Target and spend $20. And his scrabble idea would amount to one _expensive_ game of scrabble... $500 gameboard and $100+ for each players' letter holder???
I think the Surface is more practical for this than this device (if any) but the real device is probably already in most living rooms: XBox/PS3 with a marketplace.
Even maintains purity of purpose, can serve content, and isn't at risk of spilling beer on it.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
"and because the iPad is a computer it can store thousands of games and add a variety of interactive features."
No mention of flash in that sentence, or the entire article.
No mention of emulators in the article.
No mention of playing NES, Amiga, MAME games AT ALL in the article.
Wild assumptions that the games have to be flash, or have to come from NES, Amiga, MAME emulators. You're assumptions are just as weird as this article. Yes I think the article is dumb too.
Which means that *functionally* it is not capable of multitasking. Apple is selling a device that is hardware+firmware+software. I couldn't care less what the hardware is capable of if the firmware does not allow me to make use of it.
Analogy time: You can raise the tastiest pigs in the world, and cure the awesomest bacon ever known to man, but if I keep kosher, I can't eat it. See, Apple is rabbinical law, and the i~Device hardware is the bacon. Apple only wants you to eat Apple-cured bacon, which isn't made from pigs at all. It's made from hipsters in Apple's secret Cupertino rent-controlled hipster abbatoir. You can't have the regular bacon, which is unfettered hardware.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The upsides,
* instantaneous setup times
* correctly enforced rules
* correct and fast update/maintenance costs.
* instantaneous putup times
The downsides,
* DRM means you don't own the game. When the DRM approval engine expires, so does your game. (re: Divx DVD's & many others).
* No house rules
* No unapproved addon content
* Possible restrictions on where and when you can play the game (i.e. We've detected you are in Belgium and are not licensed to play this game in that country).
Peculiar up/downsides revealed by BSW.
* Remote play with others.
* Loss of social aspect of gaming when playing remotely.
* Fast games takes away part of the human reason for boardgaming.
* Some games are trivialized when the mechanics are automated.
* "others" is increasingly dominated by master players over time (unlike your local gaming group).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
They're really reaching for this one...
Our senior capstone students are working on a multitouch + handheld game system. http://ecologylab.net/courses/capstone/projects/multimodalMultitouchCardGame/index.html -Z
The iPhone OS is completely, 100% capable of full multitasking and uses multithreading extensively. Apple has chosen to restrict most of its own and all 3rd party applications to run only 1 at a time.
"Incapable of" vs "capable of but disallows" seems to be a pretty pedantic difference. The one way it's not is that it means that if you jailbreak it, there's a chance that you can break that restriction too.
Isn't creating a platform and letting people develop for it pretty much the definition of a computer company? Or do you only use programs that are made by microsoft on your Windows computer?
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Flash is awful. HTML5 will do all flash can do and more, without sucking my CPU cycles and battery life. My browser blocks flash. Whenever I open flash component, my browser with flash eventually goes to the top of my thread list in terms of processor usage. My CPU fan eventually whirs on.
I think we should boycott flash. If enough people start blocking it, ad producers will be forced to change over to HTML5, which is an open standard.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Okay, play monopoly on your cribbage board. How about Sorry! on your Chinese checker board. How about Chess on your poker table.
I have a whole closet full of "Board Games" and their props and pieces.
A reconfigurable game space would be nice.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You're missing the point. No one is trying to convince you that it's a good thing. You have made up your mind, and that's cool
Oh, plenty of people on here have tried, lol.
The point is, your opinion isn't necessarily all that meaningful in the context of the use cases of this device.
That is not true at all. I was actually really excited about this thing, because I've been wanting a straight tablet with no keyboard for a while now. It would be quite handy for diagnostics in the garage, great for gaming/browsing the net while watching TV, double as an e-comic reader...pretty much everything I want in a tablet, the iPad offers.
That being said, I'm not paying $500 or more for a locked down device with no expansion, no external ports, and no multitasking. I'll just wait for some other similarly priced (or cheaper!) tablet that doesn't require permission from the company that built it just so I can use whatever program I want.
Am I the target demographic for the iPad? Not since it's details have been released, I'm not. I certainly was, but I'm not now.
Living With a Nerd
Digital comics on a 27" monitor are BETTER than physical comics. I've been giving my physical comics away to a couple friends who value that kind of thing. To me they are just clutter.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
>And yet you correctly state that the iPhone OS (and the iPad version is the same) don't do multi-task/threading.
Actually, I stated the exact opposite, that the iPhone OS is capable of and almost always has more than one application running at once. Additionally, almost every single app made for the iPhone is multi-threaded.
>And it's one more reason why the iPad isn't even close any kind of ultimate game machine.
Actually, I disagree with this. What benefit does it bring to a game to be running in an OS along-side other applications? Off the top of my head, I can't think of a purpose-built gaming machine that allows you to switch between multiple running applications.
One of the Crystal Chronicles sequels launched on both DS and Wii, but not like GC original. You could play with one person on the Wii with one game disc, and others on DSes with their own game cards, but it wasn't downloading the Wii "master copy" onto the DS - just using Wifi for a multiplayer game.
The Ignite piece on O'Reilly media from an app dev (I saw it last week I think) had a guy whip up a board game score calculator as his first failed app attempt.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
You are stupid. Not incredibly so, as I am definitely not new here. I see a great deal of stupidity like yours every day.
The iPhone OS does multitasking and multithreading. It's not just capable of it -- it does it every day for millions of users.
All but one of the games you mentioned are in the 30 Dollar range. Much cheaper than most videogames and a heck of a lot cheaper than an iPad.
I appreciate where you're coming from, but I'm not about to pay Apple $500 for a device I have to jailbreak to get what I want from it. At that point there's no warranty support anymore, and (according to Apple, anyway) I've broken the law.
It's simply the wrong tool. It's too tightly coupled to a secondary device for any game that has "secret" information.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
To be a perfect board game, it needs to have holographic pieces that project out of the screen.
Hmmm. Exact opposite.
>Apple has chosen to restrict most of its own and all 3rd party applications to run only 1 at a time. Several built-in applications run in the background instead of exiting, such as Safari, Mail and the Phone applications.....
We'll have to disagree. I like its gaming CPU (the A4???) and its delicious nVidia or even ATI GPU subsystem.
Maybe you were thinking of bored (sic) games.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Don't forget:
Carcasonne
Agricola
Last Night on Earth
Pandemic
Ticket to Ride
Steam
and many more
There are TONS of great board games out there that are fun to play and don't follow the "roll the dice and race to a finish line" concept.
As I said, engage brain before mouth.
Read what I wrote again... properly.
If you do so you will see that I *WROTE* precisely what you said - namely that *BECAUSE* it cannot support Flash games or emulators, then it is quite impracticable to assume that it can support thousands of games - which presumably can only be downloaded from the Apple Store.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Exactly. It's hit and miss on whether a kid can handle a gameboy, and those things are renown for being able to take a beating. I don't think I'll be giving a bunch of kids $700 of hardware to play Monopoly on any time soon...
I agree.
But the whole point of the article seems to be to find possible uses for this product, in this case as a board game platform, which makes me wonder what usage it has in the first place.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
This is just an attempt by apple to make this appealing.
It's a genius strategy really. What do rich hipsters want more than anything? Answer: board games.
I dunno, there is just something about having the actual trade (I don't collect singles, only TPB and THB) that digital just doesn't do for me. Don't get me wrong, a well-fucntioning portable e-comic reader would be awesome for travel, but at home I still prefer the real thing.
Strange...I don't feel the same way about books.
Living With a Nerd
And you could buy pretty much every half decent board game out there for the cost of the iPad, and they won't stop working in 18-24 months either.
Analogy time: You can raise the tastiest pigs in the world, and cure the awesomest bacon ever known to man, but if I keep kosher, I can't eat it. See, Apple is rabbinical law, and the i~Device hardware is the bacon. Apple only wants you to eat Apple-cured bacon, which isn't made from pigs at all. It's made from hipsters in Apple's secret Cupertino rent-controlled hipster abbatoir. You can't have the regular bacon, which is unfettered hardware.
Wait... The iPad hardware is bacon, and the bacon isn't bacon, but bacon is hardware, and Apple wants you to eat kosher and...
I think you lost me. Could you try this as a car analogy?
Bow-ties are cool.
You know what I do like to play though? Monopoly. But then again, I don't "sit around" playing board games, they're more of a last resort kind of thing.
I think you have your causality reversed.
Backgrounder. I don't use it (anymore), but it works. And battery life suffers accordingly. Honestly the problem is that Apple refuse(s/d) to allow quick-swap of the battery, which is a feature common to almost every other phone that supports multitasking. It's the only thing I envy about the Palm Pre. Design simplicity is one thing, but it shouldn't come at the cost of removing features that would be beneficial to large segments of the customer base.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It would be a very small board and there could be a lot of misclicks (mistouches?). A pen would help but we'll have to wait until the iPad gets its first client for a go server. Too bad it doesn't run Java: there would be a KGS client out of the box.
On the read-only side, based on my experience a 2" phone screen is large enough for studying games.
I think he meant to say, dedicated board gamers. The kind of people who go to boardgamegeek.com or hang out in the Fantasy Flight forums. People who know the difference between German style boardgames and American style board games.
These are people for whom the board game is the first resort, not the last. People who will deliberately make time for board games. (Think John Locke on Lost.)
Monopoly is a dreadful board game, and I don't understand why anyone ever plays it. Scrabble seems good though.
But seriously, next time you are thinking of playing Monopoly, go out and buy a game of Cosmic Encounter. Then throw your copy of Monopoly in the garbage or the nearest compost heap.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
God I love Stratego,
Of course most of them are pretty complicated so unless you have dedicated board game playing friends (in which case $100 for a game probably doesn't phase you), the games will just sit on the shelves. Even games like risk (or even monopoly) stay on the shelves because people don't want to spend the time to play them through since the games can get extremely long if nobody fouls up at the start.
I think most of the games I play with my friends came from ebay/thrift stores (although it explains why sometimes we don't get the pop culture trivia). Most of them are games that are easy to stop/start/change number of players (and usually explain the rules easily). Games like catch phrase, taboo, cutthroat uno, or pit win out over games with long setup times and rigid player structures (team games also help...since losing a teammate doesn't kill the game like losing a player in Risk might).
Having an ipad or a multitouch tabletop could be a good way solve setup times, rules calls (only allow legal moves so no arguments about bad wording in the instructions) and missing players (subbing in a mediocre AI player if somebody has to go home). the ipad might not be big enough for this to be a great plan with more than a few people...but it might get developers thinking
Bottles.
I must have skipped the pre-worship but as far as I can see, the iPad is an iPod Touch with a bigger screen. Did I miss anything out?
It's not a tablet computer because its been deliberately crippled, its an appliance just like the iPod Touch.
If the fanboys want a real Apple Tablet then its already out there and its only partially made by Apple: the Modbook
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
The problem I see with this is what very few games would make sense for one player on the device. And the article mostly focuses on everyone getting around an iPad at the table. Even their picture shows the board taking up an entire screen. Where are each player's cards and money count? You can't fit all the cards and be able to read them, so you need a pop up larger view. You'd also need a pop up menu for trading, building, and mortgaging. Also, the article tries to make it sound cool to integrate the iPhone to be able to hold your letters during a Scrabble game. But that's really just missing a larger draw back. Any game where you have to hide your cards is out unless you just pass around the iPad to however's turn it is. And I don't own an iPhone/iPod Touch and I'm not planning on getting one. Am I going to be expected to drop $300 for an iPod Touch if my friend buys an iPad and has people over to play it?
Then the article goes on to talk about being able to play board games over the internet with people all over the world. I'd love to see it explain to me how the iPad is better than my lap at that. The only thing it seems to have me beat on is a touchscreen, and I'm not that impressed.
yup. This is just an attempt by apple to make this appealing.
And it is appealing. In fact, I think it's the only area where the iPad has anything meaningful to offer over other products already on the market.
The idea of a multitouch screen for automated boardgames isn't new, and it'd be incredibly powerful for automating the administration of complex boardgame. The only real problem is that the iPad is way too small for most complex boardames.
(P.s. his causality is 100% wrong)
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
The kids won't have much to lose, but they will have a very expensive platform to break. A Game Boy was very rugged, probably for this reason. Somehow, I don't see the iPad surviving as well.
SSC
They did, didn't they?
I had no argument with the thousands of games part. While there are thousands of apps already available via the app store, I do not know the load the device can take.
But I still think it was silly and presumptious of you to argue that having thousands of quality games available is unlikely because it lacks support for Flash (which sucks anyway) or games made available through emulators.
Speaking of Fantasy Flight Games, I have Arkham Horror and the expansions. Each of the big boxes are $50 and the small ones are $25 I think. Roughly $325 for the set. So far.
It's a fun cooperative game and the group enjoys it. But it's not cheap.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
My god would you fucking let it go, not everyone gives a shit or at least point out someone who has 'lost rights' to something from iTunes.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
So what do you do with your cardboard monopoly or chess board when you are half way through a game and the captain says to return to your seats, place the tray tables in the upright locked position and prepare for landing? I guess it's game over.
You know, I can't say I know a good, non-electronic solution for Monopoly - but for Chess or Scrabble, you could buy a "travel" set - and when you've got to put it away, you just fold it up and put it away, and the game's still there when you come back to it.
My mom had this great old travel Scrabble from the 1960s or something - letters were vinyl or something, it folded very thin. Main problem with it was the letters wouldn't always stick to the board, or (when folding the board) could stick to the opposite side of the board, upside-down. The current travel scrabble seems rather more reliable (if a lot larger) - the letter tiles pop into square recesses in the board surface...
Bow-ties are cool.
Actually I thought there was a new Board Game from FFG at $100. I forget the name and don't have access to look it up from work. I have Arkham Horror also from FFG. The whole set runs about $325.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
What you're saying is: you're not a board gamer, you're not familiar with modern board games, the only board games you do know are old and tired, and you only play those as a last resort.
Maybe you should have a look at BoardGameGeek. Several of the games he mentioned are in the top-10, and deservedly so.
Agreed. There is a whole other level of board games after Scrabble. (bofh on BBG :) ).
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Yeah, it's almost like people have so deeply accepted the idea that Apple is a product/marketing genius of a company that it's hard for them to accept the idea that an Apple product would be lame (especially when it looks so pretty), so now they are trying to rationalize why it actually could be useful. Board games on an iPad is a stretch.
Everyone I've talked to so far who think the iPad is really awesome tends to change their mind once they realize some of the limitations (admittedly I haven't talked to a significant portion of the population). If the iPad were a mini computer, it would be awesome. Instead it is a giant phone. If I got one I would feel like a dork carrying around a phone that I couldn't talk to anyone with, especially if I have to carry a laptop around with me at the same time. And imagine if you have to get another computer to sync it with all the time? That will be horrible.
Computer replacement = cool.
Giant (un-callable) phone = lame
Most of the people who like it seem to think of it as a computer replacement. We'll see if they can actually do that.
Qxe4
I know the only reason I would ever play a board game is to have fun, and I know that I find Scrabble fun.
Can you explain this logic of yours to me? Because I'm certainly not going to spend my time digging through some forum online to try finding out why somebody thinks that "perfect board game" isn't a subjective term.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Oh man, I didn't realize anyone else knew about Hero Quest. I just got incredible nostalgia from your post. I used to make all my non-nerd friends come over and play Hero Quest for my birthdays when I was a kid. Either that or the board game version of Civilization.
Eventually the computer version of Civilization came out, but I still prefer the board game format to be honest. I'm not sure how well Hero Quest would survive the transition to an iPad, given that the plastic figurines were half the visual/tactile appeal of the game.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
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.
Oh, shit! The world is ending! How are we ever going to create a fun game that takes less than 65MB of storage space? It's impossible, I tell you! Any decent game must at least fill up a CD-ROM or it's no good at all!
Bow-ties are cool.
This is exactly the frustration I have with my Kindle. While everyone is happily reading their paperbacks, I have to sit staring at the back of the seat in front of me, waiting for the restrictions to be lifted.
This is just an attempt by apple to make this appealing
By Apple?
I read Andrew Lim in the byline.
No relevant search results seem to pop up for "Andrew Lim Apple Flack" or "Andrew Lim Apple Shill," so it seems likely this was just a guy with a theory on the internet.
Of course, it could be that Apple's PR and marketing tendrils are even more subtle, deep, and devious than we've ever suspected.
Tweet, tweet.
False comparison.
You will never convince paying the say for a computer that isn't easy to lug around and weigh less then 1.5 pounds is a good thing.
Depends on what you want to do. If you are talking about running Cad and high end games, then no the iPad is not a good value for the money.
OTOH, if you want a color device you can easily carry around and share, then it is a good value for the money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What board games are you buying and where are you shopping? Last time I checked Scrabble and Monopoly were still in the sub-20 dollar range. Even Axis and Allies is 40-50 bucks.
Those are some pretty old games. True, there are also many recent boardgames are also in the $20-$30 price bracket, but there are also a lot that cost $50+ even for just the basic game. With expansions, many games can easily cost more than $100. Even good old Settlers of Catan can get close to $200 if you buy all the expansions.
The basic ASL rulebook costs $100, and that's without any boards. Get Beyond Valor as well, and you're close to $200. I'm sure there are people who've spent more than $1000 on that game. (Hm... porting VASL to the iPad could be a very good idea.)
Speaking of games that people spend $1000s on, what about Magic the Gathering? Playing that on a couple of automated boards so you don't have to buy all the cards, could save you a fortune.
Analogy time: You can raise the tastiest pigs in the world, and cure the awesomest bacon ever known to man, but if I keep kosher, I can't eat it. See, Apple is rabbinical law, and the i~Device hardware is the bacon. Apple only wants you to eat Apple-cured bacon, which isn't made from pigs at all. It's made from hipsters in Apple's secret Cupertino rent-controlled hipster abbatoir. You can't have the regular bacon, which is unfettered hardware.
er, a little confusing :)
Can we have a car analogy maybe? a bad analogy? PizzaAnalogyGuy can you help us?
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
Oh, I fully agree with you (for other reasons too). I just appreciate that not everyone may agree with us, and for them, jailbreaking the iPhone to get multiprocessing might be a no-brainer.
actually, he's quite accurate. You can use things such as a flat object as a gameboard if you are worried about it. Or you could copy the existing design by hand onto a new board for about $0, cost being time and very low material cost.
Meanwhile, lots of people who are apple fans are seriously disappointed with this thing. As an apple hater, I'm not surprised, but I've heard of 1 out of maybe...85+ apple fanatics I know that actually wants the thing.
well, my my, is it the Apple thought police or some other reason why the parent comment is moderated the way it is moderated? Whatever that comment is, I really need to find out why it is moderated 'Flamebait'?
You can't handle the truth.
I know its processor capabilities well.
That's interesting. I'd been given to understand that this was a proprietary processor. The only explanation I can think of is that you were actually part of the A4 or iPhone OS team.
And yet you correctly state that the iPhone OS (and the iPad version is the same) don't do multi-task/threading.
Okay, you weren't on the OS team, and you have some reading comprehension difficulties, otherwise, you wouldn't have said that, given that the GP actually went to some pains to point out the OS does do multitasking/multithreading, and he's correct. So, that leaves the A4 team.
What can you tell us about the chip?
Tweet, tweet.
Will I buy one? No (see above for 'meh' factor). I just don't have a need for it, but I can see the appeal.
Me neither. To me, the boardgame option is really the only thing the iPad has to offer over other devices on the market. But even then: it's too small and too closed. Give me something 2 - 4 times that size, with multitouch and an open interface, and we're talking. I'd love to develop some innovative games for a platform like that.
It doesn't matter what the OS is capable of if apple has restricted it. These are the kinds of things which are the reason that developers, linux users, windows users don't like apple.
To each their own, but I didn't buy a snazzy phone to be unable to do other things while listening to music (or running an application). It's actually kinda important to be allowed to multitask.
The issue here is simple. It's not whether apple will eventually change this or not, it's about the fact that you're buying it knowingly screwed in the first place.
I made the transition for books a while back. I still buy books but usually give them to a library after reading them. I used to have about 5,000 books and now I'm down to about 300.
I don't buy single comics any more and rely on my buds to highlight anything good on TPB. I'm so overwhelmed by entertainment options these days that I can't keep up.
And with all the reboots in the comic book universes, I lost connection to them as an ongoing coherent universe. I expect they will reboot again every 5-8 years now.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Did I not say that a 64GB iPad could hold 1000 games averaging 65MB each?
Again, if you read my post properly, I commented on the capability of the UI to display that many pages of icons because, presumably, the interface is similar to the Touch where you just create game/app launchers on different pages, rather than being able to create folders to have more of a tree-like standard OS structure.
My point being that if each "page" can display, say, 50 icons, having to scroll through up to 20 pages to find one of your "thousand" games would be fairly unmanageable.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Actually the music will quite happily keep playing in the background.
and cardboard games can't be magically used on 20 different devices. iPad games however can be used on every device you own. Two iPads three iPhones and a iPod touch no problem.
I think you grossly underestimate the number of half decent board games out there. BGG has 1396 games that rate a 6 or higher.
I think you've fallen for the "games are for kids" fallacy there.
Runewars for the Casual gamer? Give me a fucking break. I've never heard of it, and when I looked at the # of pieces that comes with the game, I thought it made Axis and Allies look like Candyland.
Runewars includes:
* 40-page instruction guide
* Nearly two hundred highly-detailed plastic miniatures
* Over two hundred tokens
* Over two hundred cards, both small and standard sized
* 13 map tiles
The contents of the box:
192 plastic figures
10 plastic mountains
12 plastic dial connectors
16 activation tokens
1 battle marker
7 city tokens
26 damage tokens
8 defeated hero markers
20 development tokens
35 exploration tokens
4 home realm setup markers
40 influence tokens
13 large map tiles
12 resource arrows
38 rune tokens
16 stronghold tokens
24 training tokens
4 faction sheets
4 reference sheets
32 order cards
23 quest cards
30 fate cards
12 hero cards
16 objective cards
25 reward cards
32 season cards
50 tactics cards
3 title cards
1 40-page rulebook
bacon is not kosher, and I am a jew who knows about keeping kosher. your argument is moot, you meshuguna.
Let me try a spin at your bacon analogy. It's more like:
you make awesome bacon, and you'd love to eat it how you want, but apple has said you may only eat tripe, and well...a lot of people don't like tripe.
It doesn't matter what functionality exists if you cannot use it. Car analogy #2 today: Maybe my car can get 100 miles to the gallon, but only if I was capable to drive 100% downhill with the engine off. etc.
Meanwhile, every other tablet AND netbook I know has a: multitasking, b: touchscreen, c: flash support and d: realistic battery usage as opposed to magic promises of 10 hrs of battery life that doesn't specify if it's under heavy usage or what. Factor in what battery life a 1.5lb device has, and it's super unlikely that it's more than 10 hours standby.
You will be able to read books, regardless of where you purchased, you will be able to play mp3, regardless of where you purchase them, you don't have to pay any monthly fee unless you want 3g.
\
Now so much as a walled garden as it is a picket fenced garden.
Multi-tasking is irrelevant. What is relevant is can ti do what you need? If it doesn't multi-task, but you can get the use you need out of it, does it matter? It would be the first single tasking machine that can do different things at the "same time"
"You can raise the tastiest pigs in the world, and cure the awesomest bacon ever known to man, but if I keep kosher, I can't eat it."
Assuming you are referring to Jewish faith, you just need paper plates and plastic utensils. You don't violate the rule.
If you don't know your own belief, why should anyoine expect you to know what the hell you are ever talking about?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Perhaps I can help.
Think of a car and its transmission. Transmissions require fluid changes from time to time. Many transmissions use fluid that conforms to certain industry standards (say, DEXRON, MERCON, ATF, various gear oils of varying viscosity, like 70W-90, etc.) - consequently, you can find fluid for these transmissions from a variety of brands at a variety of price points. Other transmissions, on the other hand, require specialty fluids that are only available from the manufacturer - ECVT transmissions, like the one used in the Nissan Murano, tend to be prone to this.
In the case of a phone, think of Android as a standard-issue transmission that uses industry standard fluid - you can get Android apps from just about anywhere at varying price points, everybody is already kind of unwittingly making them anyway, etc. Meanwhile, think of Apple's iProducts as that fancy transmission that requires very specific fluid to operate. Just like that fancy transmission, there is a chance that Apple's iProduct does certain things that aren't possible or aren't easy to do with regular "fluids", which is why Apple insists on its special fluid - however, just like that fancy transmission, when it comes time to get more "fluid", you have to go through the manufacturer to get it and you're at the manufacturer's whims over whether or not it will continue to carry the "fluid" and at what price it will sell it to you.
Does that help?
Sure:
The iPad is a mini cooper. Since it can't be used as a dump truck, it sucks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
you can jailbreak (root, as I am implying) non apple devices to get more features for less dollars. This is why android is so much more popular lately. For technical people it's basically like the argument of windows vs linux.
I would argue that they are cheap.
Computer games sell for 60 bucks and can only be used by one person in a household at a time.
Good board games, the Ticket to Ride, or settlers cost 60 bucks, but many people can play in your house at one time.
The reasale of popular game sis also higher.
Pay 10 bucks for a movie for 2 hours of entertainment per person. Thats 6 movies, or 12 hours. A board game can get 100's of hours.
Also, cheap ass games as some excellent games.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I guess if you just play Chess, Go, and maybe the occasional game of Monopoly, it might be perfect for you. Maybe. I'd hate to play Chess on such a small board and I would loathe to play Go. If you're really into board games it's obviously crap for most games. The big problem: "screen" size. Most board games use a play area that is significantly larger than the 10" diagonal that the iPad offers. I can see different parts of the board in detail with the fastest, most intuitive interface ever: my eyes. Other people playing with my in person can look at other areas simultaneously. If I have a hand of cards, I can see them without needing to simultaneously obscure the board. If I need to move a piece or set of pieces, a touchscreen isn't bad, but a tactile experience is superior and has zero learning curve.
I can envision games that port reasonably well to the iPad. I can envision "board" games designed specifically for the iPad that rock. Something like Microsoft's Surface would really rock for many purposes, but the iPad has a clear portability win. (Of course, the iPhone is even more portable.) There may be merit to board gaming on the iPad. But as the "perfect" solution for playing board games it's laughable.
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I play Arkham Horror. Main game was $50. Optional expansions are $20 (card-only) and $40 (cards plus extra board pieces). We have 3 or 4 of the expansions now, and are trying to figure the best way to set it up, since it takes up most of a sheet of plywood.
I'm about to buy a piece of melamine and put in metal stops, so that we can more easily keep track of pieces. It's the one down side to the game - so many moving parts. (that being said, the game itself is awesome - a cooperative lite-RPG game where you all work together. Like doing an old-school RPG, but not as deep and without a DM needed)
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
That's a shame. While there not bad games, there are some very good board games. Of course they require thinking.
Monopoly would play great on the iPad. Scrabble could work, but you just pass the iPad to each player.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Right, I want you to hold your breath, count to 10, then read my article again, this time properly.
Now, can you please tell me, as the Apple expert you obviously are, how easy it would be to manage 1000 icons across multiple screens on the iPad such that the article author's statement of "thousands" of games can be deemed to be valid.
I am making the assumption that, just like the iPod Touch, there is no way to physically group icons in logical folders - in which case each game would need its own icon somewhere on one of a multiple number of screens.
Now that I've made it as simple as possible for you, either provide an intelligent answer or not comment at all - just please don't go flying off again at a tangent.
Thanks.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
errr... I didn't mean to imply what ever else you do doesn't require thinking.
Sorry about that. I meant you can't just 'sit around' and play. You need to pay close attention to other players and formulate strategies more complex then those of monopoly and scrabble.
again, sorry for implying you don't think.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hey, if it's fun, go right ahead. I've played a lot of Scrabble. However, I don't play it very much anymore. I've got about 3 dozen various board games, from easier multiplayer ones like Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride, to day-long war games like Axis and Allies and Risk. I've also got some "mainstream party" games like Pictionary, Scrabble, and UNO.
Perfect is subjective, and depends on what you want to play at the time and how much time you have on hand. If you don't want to dig on the forums, you can look at the ratings for the games. Agricola, Power Grid, Puerto Rico are all very good games.
For someone to say that they're an expert on board games and bring up Scrabble shows that they don't know what they're talking about. What if, for example, they said "This is the perfect Sci-Fi tablet -- you can get the complete works of L. Ron Hubbard." you'd wonder what, if any, credibility they had.
By the way, EA will be the ones writing Scrabble (just ask Scrabulous how it worked out), so Have Fun.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Like the MS surface, but running BSD or Linux?
That could be fun
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
yes, and how much will you pay someone to put al those games into a small portable device?
Why do you think they will stop working?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Given that you already have an iPad for other applications, and have it with you, it would be nice for games. I'd love to see Goban ported to the iPad. It's not full-on Go without the sound of polished slate/shell slapping onto a block of wood, but it'd be much better than a vinyl board and plastic stones for a game when you're on the go, or a quick net game after lunch.
Lots of people want to be able to use a computer without having to use one. They don't want to ever see the computer geek side of computer ownership. They only want the benefits. Access to the the content they consume etc. Non geek benefits are not the same as geek benefits. Geeks value multi-use, multi-configuration devices and software. Geeks may also value learning complex rituals that they have to use to get the computer to work. Non-geeks want to turn on the device and maybe change the channel. There are very many people who want an appliance not a computer. These are the people this type of device is designed for.
Yeah and you can't play stratego on a tablet, even with 2 iPhones.
My addiction: Arguing with idiots. AKA Slashdot!
Are you suggesting that Apple targets their products to the end-user needs of the "standard person"?
If so, their share of the market would seem to indicate that the "standard person" prefers other manufacturers' products.
I don't think it's unfair to say that Apple is after a certain niche of consumers. There's nothing wrong with that. They have been very successful among a certain segment of the population and have created some iconic products. There are people out there who buy Van Dutch meshback caps for $90 and Ed Hardy bottled water. There are people who ran out and bought Segways. And there are people who will be happy to drop $800 for an iPad with all the options.
If history is any guide, the "standard person" who believes he or she needs a tablet computer will more likely drop $300 for an Asus with practically all of the same features (plus a camera and SD slot and OS that allows you to run apps from more than one source, including your own if you want to.)
You are welcome on my lawn.
You could just spend $20 on a regular Scrabble board game.
It is modded down because the author of TFA had some mod points.
"His name was James Damore."
No dice. Less space than Monopoly. Lame.
I imagine that it will become considerably more compelling, like iPhone and iPod, at around version 3.0. Wait, does that mean Apple is the new Microsoft?
Meanwhile, every other ... netbook I know has ... touchscreen
Ummm.... every? Did you mean just a few?
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
Tons of comments here about how it's a waste to use a $500 computer to play a simple board game... And rightly so, I'd say. It seems like a real stretch, looking for a defense of the iPad. But... if you ignore the cost issue and look beyond traditional board games I think this is an interesting idea.
Basically - you could play a "board-game" style game on just about any kind of computer - but some are better than others. If I play chess or scrabble with someone next to me, using my phone as the game board, then we pretty much have to switch back and forth - meaning that when one person is taking their turn, it's difficult for other people to think about theirs. A game console like the Wii or PS3 also works, but these tend to be fixed in location, which isn't ideal - plus everyone's focus is directed toward the single monitor, it diffuses the social aspect a bit, I think. A tablet-style machine like this presents a very tactile experience - a game board that's easy to gather around (as long as the display has a good viewing angle range), turn, move, etc. as necessary. In terms of how the interaction works, it is uniquely capable of presenting a game in the same way as a board game is presented.
Where this could be really neat, I think, is in terms of how this could potentially lead to different kinds of board-game-style games... Things that still work kind of like board games but take advantage of the computer's involvement, too. It'd be interesting to see how that could play out.
Bow-ties are cool.
So, you're saying that the Apple iPhone could fully multitask and use multithreading if not for Apple?
You are welcome on my lawn.
My GOD would you just let it go already? iTunes, technology, the internet, gadgets, the effects of transferring from an analog system to digital, that's all you guys ever fucking talk about on slashdot. JESUS! It's like a broken record.
THAT'S IT! I'm getting my non-tech news from some other tech site!
(Come on, he has a pertinent point here.)
you need to take your own advice.
The article talks about board games, and you complained about flash and emulators.
I mean, really think for a bit. Du you really think all games are flash or emulators? I didn't think so.
Just in case no one told you:
There are thousands of games that don't require flash or anything emulated.
Here is a few:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_board_games
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's not just that it's not a dump truck, but it won't even let you carry your own groceries home from the store.
You are welcome on my lawn.
for those folks on the go
I'm on the go. Always on the go. While I have a main office I have several other satellite locations. I was hoping that my iPhone would replace my Nokia. It replaced some features, added a few but removed many more useful ones. I don't expect a device to meet my every need but I hope that it follows standards. I had come to associate Bluetooth to a standard that allowed me to interact with devices in an easy but yet simple way. My wife can send a file to my iMac with Bluetooth but not to my iPhone. iPhone broke the implementation that is (or I) associated with the word Bluetooth. I would expect a device that is designed for "on the go" would connect through various means and not just through iTunes like the iPhone. Before I got my iPhone I could not understand why people wanted to get rid of it, now I know.
As for the iPad if it needs iTunes then its not a serious product.....
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
See, you weren't talking about icon management (nor was the article), you were just saying that 64GB isn't enough space for thousands of games. I say it is. 64MB is bigger than most Nintendo DS games, and it's bigger than downloadable WiiWare or XBLA games. 64MB gets eaten up pretty quickly once you throw in a lot of media like video clips or even audio - but in terms of what kind of game you can make in 64MB, it's plenty...
If you want to talk about how to organize a thousand game icons - it is not an insurmountable problem by any means. If you say the iPhone OS isn't up to the task... Well, I can't necessarily say you're wrong. I have a great deal of apathy with regard to the platform. :)
Bow-ties are cool.
That's my point. It's locked down.
I know the iPhone's processor. The iPad is said to use most all of the current software, so I'm clued into what the A4 is and what it does to be able to accomplish that feat.
Therefore, if Apple doesn't lock down the OS running the A4, it'll get ringed by the first clever Rumanian that tries it.
Worse, no one makes a decent power-saving GPU kit. So gaming is going to be tough-- this is a raster-rendering, not vector-rendering design.
And if I worked near the same building as you, I'd be watching my stock price. It just started tilting south.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
This is your 21st century board game
http://sifteo.com/
If you scratch the top of your scrabble board, you are not out $500.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Mod parent up. He's orthodox, but he's right.
Sorry for the meat metaphors, too.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I'm curious, why not just send it to your iPhone via e-mail? It's not overly difficult that way.
As to iTunes, there are quite a few free OSS alternatives. Don't like iTunes, just use something else.
...lots of people who are apple fans are seriously disappointed with this thing.
Ah but does the iPad appeal to people who are not Apple fans? I ask because there are a lot more of those people. Make a device that appeals to them and you'll make money as fast as it can be printed.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Oh, now somebody is telling me what I wrote...
I'm not going to repeat myself, please read my original post once again - I know what I said.
And if you believe 1000 icons *ARE* manageable on an iPhone or iPad, then kindly enlighten me - as a techie, I am always interested in hearing how a problem is surmounted.
But as I look at my iPod Touch now, one screen holds up to 16 icons (I assume it's the same for the iPhone). Therefore, to hold 1000 icons would need 62.5 screens - it would be quite a task to scroll through that many screens to get to a game near the end, and that does assume the Touch/iPhone can have that many screens.
If there is an app to do some kind of folder management of icons, then that would make it much easier to organise.., plus I'm guessing the iPad screen holds maybe 50 icons per screen, but that would still need 20-odd screens for all of them.
So if you believe I am wrong then I am more than happy for you to tell me how so - so please enlighten me.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Since it has a multitouch 9.7 screen, there are various cool applications that can be done on it:
-2 player or 4 player pong, where each player controls his/her pad with his/her finger.
-subbuteo (tabletop soccer)
-soccer/football
-pool (using a stylus in the role of the cue)
-the old qbasic Bananas game with the two players throwing simultaneously
Finally, there could be other uses for the iPad. For example, a digital turntable.
If your going to quote someone, at least use the whole part of whatever they wrote/said that is in reference to what your trying to contradict seeing as how he wrote:
"Ugg, I'm getting tired of hearing this misunderstanding. The iPhone OS is completely, 100% capable of full multitasking and uses multithreading extensively. Apple has chosen to restrict most of its own and all 3rd party applications to run only 1 at a time. Several built-in applications run in the background instead of exiting, such as Safari, Mail and the Phone applications."
You seemed to miss the whole last line, as right there he is saying that it does have serveral built-in applications that run in the background, even naming them. Now if you had been saying that as a developer you want that capability that's one thing, but stating that it doesn't allow it at all is false.
letting an idiot know they are an idiot is not a game... it's a responsibility. - by Kristopeit, M. D. (1892582)
I may be in the minority here, but one of the reasons I play board games is specifically because they *aren't* electronic. For once everyone has to use their brains - there's no computer to tell them the rules or make sure they play correctly.
But only in the US. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
And it costs as much as a dump truck...
To clarify what others have tried, but apparently failed, to inform you of.
The iPhone OS, which is OS X with some differences here and there between it and Mac OS X, is quite good at multitasking and multithreading. The iPhone makes extensive use of this, as do its apps.
What the iPhone OS disallows is running third-party apps *in the background*. Built-in functions, like iPod music playing, Mail checking, SMS and call receiving, etc., all run in the background just fine.
This is just an attempt by apple to make this appealing.
But Apple didn't write this article, it's by "recombu.com" - a site that nobody has ever heard of and has nothing to do with Apple.
... and then they built the supercollider.
How come you, like at least two other repliers to my comment, seem to have the capability of reading the original article but not my response?
If you had read my posting correctly, you would have read into it that if it *WERE* possible for the iPad to support Flash games or emulators, then it would be a relatively *EASY* task of getting 1000 games onto an iPad. This is because you would not necessarily need an icon for *EACH* game because you would select the game you wanted from a pull down menu within the emulator or in the Flash tool.
*HOWEVER*, because most games on the App Store are individual downloads (maybe with the exception of some card games that support multiple versions of solitaire, or something like that), then you would need a separate icon and screen space for it for each game.
*THEREFORE* you would need to move across multiple screens, I suggest maybe as many as 20 for an iPad (because I guess one screen holds around 50 icons), in order to get to the game you wanted. This of course assumes there is no limit to the number of icons with apps you can display, or the number of screens they can be displayed upon.
What I *DARED* to suggest to those of you living in your "Apple is perfection" world is that such a large amount of icons would be far more manageable if there is an app where icons can be grouped within folders - however, I am not aware of an app that does this, at least on the Touch.
Therefore, I am stating that the author's statement of having "thousands of games" on one iPad, whilst feasibly possible from a storage perspective, would be incredibly slow to use because you would need to scroll through multiple screens to get to the game icon you actually wanted.
Is that *NOW* clear enough for you?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Depends on your definition of cheap. Certainly Settlers and Power Grid are pretty cheap (£20-£30, respectively). Much, much cheaper than a new video game, and a lot of board games are cheaper (Carcassonne can be picked up new for £15).
I think it will be great for playing go. I can place stones on my iphone pretty well and a 9.7" screen can only be better. Plus my main problem with playing on the computer right now is that I don't want to sit at my desk for hours at a time. With the iPad it would be easy to get up and move about the house while I play.
I just wish KGS would open up the protocol and let third parties create clients. I may switch to IGS in order to play online with the iPad.
Also looking forward to a version of SmartGo for the iPad.
Disclaimer: I am not questioning your opinion, nor am I discrediting it. You are completely entitled to your own thoughts.
And vice versa.
No matter what you do, say, or show me, you will never convince me that buying a device as expensive as a full computer but with only half the functionality is a good thing. Paying more and getting less is not a good thing, even if it comes wrapped up in a pretty package.
I'm not trying to convince *you* of this, just pointing out ways in which your opinion are not terribly applicable to most people.
For example, your part about paying more and getting less is a bit absurd. I can buy a PC for less than my phone (a crappy PC, to be sure, but a PC that is more powerful none the less). But it would be ridiculous for me to *not* buy my phone (and while I have an iPhone, this could very well apply to pretty much any feature phone or smart phone).
The same thing applies here. I'm not going to buy and iPad instead of a PC (or Mac). I'm going to buy it in addition to the computer I already have.
But let's look at the possibility of buying an iPad instead of a PC. While I definitely wouldn't suggest this for most people, there are still cases where this makes sense. The obvious is people who won't take advantage of that extra power a general purpose PC provides. If all you do is email, listen to music, surf the web, view photos, then the iPad not only does those thing quite well, it does much more. If you don't want the complexities of a full PC, then the iPad may be a good choice.
Not for you, of course, nor for me or for most people, but I just point this out to show that even your most ardently bold-fonted opinion isn't as universally applicable as the the heavy typeface may imply. And in spite of your disclaimer (which I accept at face value), your wording isn't in line with the "this is only my opinion for me" sentiment. You didn't state it in personal terms, you stated it in no uncertain, universal terms.
You didn't say "Paying more and getting less is not a good thing for me, even if it comes wrapped up in a pretty package.", you just said, in bold, "Paying more and getting less is not a good thing, even if it comes wrapped up in a pretty package."
That being said, I'm not paying $500 or more for a locked down device with no expansion, no external ports, and no multitasking. I'll just wait for some other similarly priced (or cheaper!) tablet that doesn't require permission from the company that built it just so I can use whatever program I want.
Like me, you seem to be in the exact opposite demographics as the one targetted by Apple.
So let me just drop a link about Always Innovating's Touch Book that I've found the other day on the web.
It's a (non-capacitative) touchscreen tablet which can be docked into a keyboard to form a netbook.
It's got plenty of USB ports, both outside (2 free) and inside (3 free) to be used the for modules (the things comes with an USB and a Wifi dongles you can put on 2 inside ports). It's powered by an ARM (the same as the beagle board) so it has a good battery life. And it's running Linux (their own distro, but compatible with Ubuntu, Android, etc.)
On the down side : no built-in VGA out, nor webcam, nor GPS, though the USB ports are here for a reason.
The price is acceptable given the openness of the device.
It's not what I would buy for a Grandma, but if you want something hackable - this is hackable by design. It's the exact anti-iPad ("anti" in the meaning "opposite of")
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Your comment seems perfect to piggy-back on, so here goes.
Funny that you mention VASL. It wasn't until I got my work laptop, with a 15" 1920x1200 widescreen, that I seriously considered going VASL. Given that a normal ASL board is 8x22", and that most scenarios are two or three boards, you can see that fitting a scenario on screen with the same amount of information preserved from the physical layout is impossible. Either you zoom out to see the entire board, losing counter detail (important in ASL), or you zoom in to 1:1 scale counters, losing your map overview at the same time.
Now try that on a 9.7" screen. It's patently absurd to think that that is suitable for any but the most trivial board games.
But the Apple fanbois are eating it up. Just like they are buying the new Macbooks with chicklet keyboards. I don't get it.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Not in the car.
The cake is a pie
Why not mail it? Because he is used to using bluetooth, because just about every other device except the Jesusphone accepts bluetooth file transfer. Why should he have to change his habits and workflow because Apple decided to only implement a subset of a standard?
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Meanwhile, lots of people who are apple fans are seriously disappointed with this thing. As an apple hater, I'm not surprised, but I've heard of 1 out of maybe...85+ apple fanatics I know that actually wants the thing.
Same thing happened on the iPhone launch. First it failed to live up to the rumors, which have the benefit of being unhindered by practicality. Press reviews were mixed, with a lot of, "*this* is the iPhone?" Then the launch there were lines (there will be lines for this, have no doubt), but the press reviews were mostly positive (expect this as well) with the obligatory downsides (no exchange, no multitasking, no third party apps). Then the launch weekend sales where huge, but shy of the analysts rumors.
Then it took off. Everyone wanted one. Sure, there were updates that helped (like the App Store), but it was already a success before that. The App Store was like the iPhone squared.
So, here we have the exact same thing. Also, the number one complaint, no multitasking. Look for news later this year about that.
As for no expansion, there are features in the iPad that address this also. The iWork suite, the camera reader, and the iDisk app are clues.
But it's NOT easy to carry around - it won't fit in a pocket, so it'll mean one hand always full, or carrying it in a bag. If you're going to do that then you may just as well carry a netbook or other small laptop or tablet with more functionality at a lower price point.
If you want a device you can easily carry around and share (!?), then the it's overpriced and underspecced - bad value for money.
At current exchange rates it's nearly 400 GBP. Alternatively I could buy a Dell Mini 10v for just over half of that and install OS X more or less without modification. And then I could run whatever software I like without Apple vetting it first to decide whether or not they deem it suitable for me to run that software. And that's the clincher - the software issue! Shame really...
Thanks... it took a long time getting there but at last someone gives me a practical response.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Does this help?
You might've had a valid argument if you specifically mentioned Mac instead of Apple as a whole. I JFGI and the iPod has a 73.8% market share. The iPhone went from 0% to 30% in two years. Certainly those aren't numbers one would expect from a certain niche of consumers.
Monopoly is a dreadful board game, and I don't understand why anyone ever plays it.
Monopoly isn't dreadful just because you don't understand its appeal to other people. Some games provide tense competition through skilled play, some provide social interaction through leisurely random or skill-less play. People who like the first may find the latter pointless and frustrating. So what? The reverse is probably true too.
I cannot stand most games, but will play card or mah jongg solitaire games every day. They relax me. Hunt and shoot games bore me to tears. I have tried to play them, but they don't do anything for me. The only game I liked beside card and mah jongg solitaires and some tetris derivatives was Space Quest 2, and that was because it was funny. But after playing that, I found the rest of the genre boring - just more of the same.
Different people, different games. I would probably throw all yours into the nearest compost heap.
I am anarch of all I survey.
No Apple hasn't, The Game Crafter has created the perfect board game platform.
What is it with Slashdot and Luddites? They post first, and always get modded up these days. It's depressing how many people on here seem to absolutely hate technology.
Cardboard is inherently quite flawed, and this thing is a demonstrably better board game platform.
If nothing else, you've got the fact that cardboard takes up a lot of space, and can only be used for one board game. You want another? You've got to have more cardboard.
This device doesn't even take up as much space as one game box, let alone the 20 or so that you might want to have handy to play.
Cardboard also has a setup and teardown time factor that's going to detract from the enjoyment of the game, this removes that.
And cardboard doesn't do animation very well, and in many games, that would be nice.
A slight jostle of the cardboard, and your game may very well be in ruins, not so with this.
I'm not an iPad fan, I don't want one, I'm not happy about lockin, I'm not happy that you'd need to jailbreak this thing to run programs from any source than Apple. But to say that cardboard is better? Hogwash.
For playing on an airplane, each player having their own netbook connected by cables is more practical for two player games, and price competitive, if you are into pressing expensive hardware into a gaming niche that's already well served by dirt cheap hardware. Plus, dirt cheap electronic travel games are readily available. An iPad doesn't add much new for portable electronic gaming except an awkward size -- inconveniently big for a travel game, small for a non-travel board.
If an iPad falls into your hands, and you are using it anyway, you might as well get some use out of it for gaming, too, but it certainly doesn't seem to me -- as both an avid technophile and an avid player of everything from simple mass-market board games to fairly complex hobbyist board games -- that it offers anything particularly exciting for board gaming.
And even for touch screen tablets, Apple did not invent this.
I did wonder how long it would be before some clueless idiot claimed this as an "Apple first" - for heaven's sake, the thing hasn't even been released yet!
It's bad enough that we get daily Iphone stories. Now I see that, even when the damn thing hasn't even been released, we're going to get daily stories about the Istale, or whatever it's called (it's hard to tell real news from vaporware). Meanwhile, actual tablets that have been released don't get a single story whatsoever!
Slashdot was once a place for geeks who knew about technology. Now it's rumours and false claims hyping Apple.
a) The limited opportunity for players to meaningfully influence the outcome of the game through their decisions (auction bids and house purchase timing is pretty much it)
b) The very limited number of winning strategies (buy orange and build like crazy is pretty much it)
c) the outcome is clear long before the win conditions are met, which makes for a dreadfully boring endgame.
There are plenty of good economic boardgames, but Monopoly isn't one of them.
PS - nobody else here is talking about video games.
I think your problem is that you are using PC prices. The iPad costs half as much as a Mac. So it's not paying more and getting less to us Mac users.
Also, you probably don't realize it now, but multi-touch is the future of the computer interface. 5 years from now, that netbook or whatever you bought instead will be a piece of dated junk, but people will still be carrying around iPads.
You can get a netbook for a fraction of the price - these are colour devices easily portable, that also are fully fledged computers, rather than the basic Islate which can't even master multitasking (is this the early 1980s, or something?), so I don't see how it's good value for money. Even if you prefer a tablet to a real keyboard, there are cheaper alternatives around.
But the whole point of the article seems to be to find possible uses for this product, in this case as a board game platform, which makes me wonder what usage it has in the first place.
Since the iPad is not the first tablet on the market, you should be able to just look around and see usage examples of other tablets. Here is the set that I know of: [ ]
And that is because manufacturers of tablets are searching for many years for such usage. The only semi-alive example is hospitals, where nurses need access to patients' charts as they move from one patient to another. Well, of course the traditional way of doing it is just to hang the chart onto the patient's bed...
But tablets aren't very popular in real world. Primarily because they limit the user too much. It is nice to have a tablet to read /. in bed at night, but are you willing to spend $800 on it? Note that the tablet won't be of any use beyond reading; its I/O functionality is minimal, on-screen keyboards are OK only for short messages, and the iPad will lack all the software that you find dear to you and that lives happily on your main computer. Other tablets haven't hurt themselves that way, and still they haven't found the customer.
Don't forget the iPod: "No Wireless, less space than Nomad, Lame."
That was then, now they've sold over 250,000,000 iPods. I don't mean to beat a dead horse here, but you simply can not gauge how successful a brand new apple product is going to be by trying to compare it to existing products on the market.
It's like a Vespa, except where every bolt on the thing is a different proprietary design.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
It's more difficult than it needs to be, I think that is his point.
How many people in offices have PHBs who *still* send documents as email attachments, when there's a perfectly good LAN between the parties ? Now think of that irritation, but on a personal level.
Apple is the iPHB.
Lots of people want to be able to use a computer without having to use one. ... These are the people this type of device is designed for.
This new device - if it's ever released - is a computer, so it fails your requirement.
And there are other tablets already around that aren't vaporware, you just won't hear about them when places like Slashdot and the BBC are giving advertising to Apple (how much are they being paid, I wonder?)
It has not.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
No, it probably doesn't.
The jury is out, of course.
But the thing is sounding more like a turkey all the time.
The iPhone is an enhanced version of a device that everybody already knows of and has. There was already a place in every customer's life for an iPhone. It simply replaced their older cell phone. The same thing can not be said at all for this thing. It isn't powerful nor versatile enough to replace their computers. It isn't small or portable enough to replace their iPhone.
The iPod was certainly a big hit, although I don't think their current market share for all portable mp3-playing devices is still at 73%.
The iPod broke some new ground and was substantially a "first of its kind" product.
Most of the other Apple products since at least the mid-90's have been incremental improvements over products that already existed from other manufacturers. There were barely any portable mp3 players when the first iPod came out. I can't think of another recent Apple product that was really the first of it's kind. Yes, iPhone had a touch screen and has some features that weren't seen before (multi-touch) but there were already smartphones and PDAs. When the iMac came out, it certainly wasn't the first all-in-one computer/monitor. Same with macbooks/powerbooks, which obviously weren't the first laptops, same with the Air, and the Airport. Actually, besides the first iPod, I can't think of another Apple product that was the first of its kind.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You've hit the nail on the head. With the appropriate s/w, travelers might love the pad. As it stands, my Gen1 Touch is usually a PDA at home/work, and a music/movie device while on travel.
In tight and/or unsteady confines, the iPad could be a reconfigurable magnetic game board, potentially with a very large virtual gaming surface. I'd like hex-based strategy games (ie. OGRE & G.E.V., I'm dating myself), which wouldn't necessarily require an AI. If Steve Jackson isn't listening, this might be the excuse to update my SDK.
Luke, help me take this mask off
So, I can buy an minivan with 7 seats or a sports car with 2 seats.
The minivan will probably be cheaper, so it must be better in every possible respect because I get more for less, right?
The concept of Flash is awesome, but it is a CPU hog and often abused in places it ought not be implemented. Good news however. Starting with Flash 10.1, it will be GPU accelerated for Windows, Mac, and Linux. So far the benchmarks have been very promising. Check out the following links for more info.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3678
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/17/adobes-flash-player-10-1-beta-gpu-acceleration-tested-document/
Life is not for the lazy.
Well sure, let's invent a product and THEN come up with ideas for how to use it. That seems like a cool idea! It worked with the Wii after all...
remind me again, what market does the iPad fill? Oh thats right, the 'I'll buy anything with an apple logo on it' market.
SQL programmer goes to a bar. Walks up to two tables and says 'Excuse me, may I join you?'.
The iPhone OS is completely, 100% capable of full multitasking and uses multithreading extensively.
Yet
Apple has chosen to restrict ... applications to run only 1 at a time.
You nullify your own delusional argument with reality. I don't get why Apple fans are so into denying the fact that apple restricts, revokes, and limits the freedoms and abilities of users and developers. Particularly in the case of the iPhone it's easy to point out a myriad of instances in which Apple has done so and each case has been one which revoked the users freedoms and been inhibitive to the development or spread of new technology. Can't put a script interpreter in your code? Well we don't want you circumventing the App store! Can't use VoIP? Our carriers just wouldn't have that. Oh, you opened a terminal and now you can actually do productive things on the phone!? Update to a locked down version or we terminate your service.
I expect to be flamed by a flood of Apple zealots, but just so you all know I won't be reading replies to this post so go nuts guys.
I hate "No matter what"s. There's often a perfectly valid "what" that should be mattered. You're still entitled to do whatever you like, it just bugs me when people use absolute language on judgement calls.
I have to say I disagree with your opinion. I haven't studied tablets extensively, but from everything I've read, they've been treated like existing computers, using existing OSes--and they shouldn't be, because existing window managers and other OS features just don't make the switch. When you come from a platform that starts explicitly with only the things the hardware is designed to be used for, you get something like the iTouch/iPhone, which is actually useful.
You can say that they should have done exactly the same thing except [long list of changes] if you like, but in the end, they made it the way they did for a reason. Celebrating their genius and scoffing at their judgement in the same breath is a little bit suspect.
What you mean like software! Software is magic! Shit, and here I was playing games with friends and my kids using physical objects, interacting freely and setting our own unique rules each time to make the game more interesting, doing things while we play and talking. But fuck that, I now I can pay a total sum of over $1000 for an iPad and an iPhone and sit at home quietly, playing with people I don't know over the internet on a flat 2d board with pieces I can't actually touch. Oh, but I can multi-touch them, I guess that's better! Hey, maybe I'll just buy two iPhones and an iPad and me and my wife can finally play scrabble without letting each-other make up funny words half way through the game because scrabble is so god damned boring - the game will check our spelling and words against an official dictionary automatically! Or maybe I can have some friends over and we can play cards without actually using cards! You know, playing cards, one pack is $.50. No no no, we'll buy an iPad and all get iPhones with restrictive and expensive 2 year contracts so we'll have spent a combined sum of thousands and thousands of dollars to play with non-tangible cards.
TRRosen, I seriously hope you can pull your head out of your ass long enough to make a physical friend, such that you can play a physical game with them, such that you will realize the same game would be immensly boring and sterile when played on a bunch expensive screens.
Oh, and there is board game software out there already, if you are going to play with something non-physical either way it seems somewhat pointless having the novelty of multitouch and bluetooth so you can clumsily flick letter tiles between screens or try and grab imaginary pieces.
I have monopoly on my notebook computer and I can put it on my Netwalker Z1 if I wanted to. There's also Monopoly on the DS. I don't need an iPad to achieve what you are suggesting.
I have kids, and we keep a variety of physical toys in the car for them to play with. We do have a TV on the navi and on our phones (Japan) but I can only think of a few occasions the kids watched TV in the car. As for board games, there is no way they would play board games on a tablet when they have DS games. Still, they tend to not bother with the DS in the car.
It probably helps to have a table underneath as the actual platform.
The iPhone is an enhanced version of a device that everybody already knows of and has. There was already a place in every customer's life for an iPhone. It simply replaced their older cell phone. The same thing can not be said at all for this thing. It isn't powerful nor versatile enough to replace their computers. It isn't small or portable enough to replace their iPhone.
It's not meant to replace either.
This is just like the netbook, which also isn't meant to replace either of those. Instead, it's the computer device you take with you, leaving the notebook at home.
As a computer, the netbook is better (and that's part of what has the geek crowd all up in a bunch), but as a device in between the smart phone and the notebook? The iPad wins hands down. All this nonsense about "it doesn't do this, it doesn't do that" is from those that want it to act like their notebook, only smaller, cheaper, and with multitouch.
Were Apple to have released that, instead, it would fail. The geeks would have rejoiced, but just like the Tablet PCs before them, the general populace really doesn't want a touch (or stylus) screened PC.
Or the most expensive. ~1500 bucks for 2 players..
And you have to be worried about batteries.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The people who will buy the iPad would spend the money on it.
Look, we get it - you have posted in several iPad threads about how totally useless it is. What you miss out is that it is totally useless TO YOU. It doesn't mean that it can't be the perfect device to someone else.
I personally have absolutely no use at all for a Netbook and after using one for a while decided it was totally not my cup of tea, but I don;t go around telling people who love using them that they are hopelessly awful, since they clearly are very useful to some people.
The iPad's software model is the same as the iPhone's, and that seems to be doing rather well despite its totally closed, walled garden approach. If you want an open app store, wait for the Nexus Slate, which will doubtless come soon.
There is actually a DOS version of Hero Quest and I'm not talking about Sierra's Hero Quest which was later renamed to Quest for Glory which you could track down and try.
I still don't think the ipad would be great at board games. Microsoft Surface on the other hand makes me drool, especially after seeing what the students are doing with their D&D project.
You forgot to say "And get off my lawn you damn kids"
I'm betting your really glad they didn't put in one of those fancy cameras that steal your soul. Sorry Grampa but things change and if you think your any different than that old coot that complained about them fancy board games because "when I was young well only played with rocks and we liked it" sorry but you've become that old man.
Not sure why you keep expecting Apple to make devices that suit you. You're never going to be in their target demographic for consumer appliances. iPhone and iPad are mass market devices, not traditional computers as such. As long as Steve Jobs is at the helm, this will remain true.
Experienced Apple pundits like John Siracusa accurately predicted what the iPad was going to be.
You do realize this is a tech site, right? Don't answer right away, take some time, maybe hit your outhouse and do some thinking and then let us know if you are a complete Luddite trolling a tech site? Maybe you can send your next post in on a physical piece of paper?
I'm considering getting an iPad to use with D&D. It would be neat to have an electronic character sheet + all the D&D references in electronic format. I still want to roll real physical dice, not have a computer throw random numbers around. Usually I roll crappy anyway which gives my characters a certain flavor. Yes I could bring my laptop but the battery life sucks and the screen gets in the way of seeing the miniatures on the table map. $500 is kind of a lot to spend just for D&D but if you add up all the crap I bought from Wizards last year, that adds up to well over $350 in books and subscription fees. And with the documentation in PDF format, it will be easier to search the content. I'll probably have to learn how to roll my own apps but I read that the iphone store has a client for filemaker - or was it bento? - so I'll probably start by developing in an app that I'm already familiar with.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
You are correct that monopoly being a terrible game. But smoke-opoly is a freaking great game. First person to jail sparks the first joint, take a hit off the bowl when you pass go, etc. Play this the day after thanksgiving. It is mandatory.
When Jobs said it runs for 10 hours, he specifically gave an example of watching video on a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo. Like all battery numbers, I'd expect it to be a bit less than the amount stated, but he did talk about a real activity. Moreover, after making the 10 hours claim, he added that standby time is one month.
It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.
I'd argue it's closer to someone saying "This is the perfect Sci-Fi tablet -- you can get the complete works of Asimov". To the science fiction affectionado with very broad tastes, this statement might seem quite silly. To the average person though, it makes a lot of sense. Asimov is a big name that lots of people know as a pretty damned good author. Are there better authors? More modern and complex authors? Sure, but brand recognition counts for a lot.
For what it's worth, I think that scrabble, or any other board game, on these devices seems like an absolutely dreadful idea. The idea of playing board games is to spend some quality time with good friends, not to stare at a cellphone, surfing the internet between turns.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
you won't be flamed... your response is much to deep in the tree.
Way to oversimplify your side of the argument ... "just emailing it".
Don't you mean creating a new email, asking the other party what his email address is and typing it in, creating an unnecessary subject and message, adding attachment and searching your filesystem for it, enabling your 3G connection, choosing which provider to use, and then clicking send ? And then of course either texting or otherwise communicating to the other party, "hey check your mail, I just sent you something".
Not to mention the file goes all the way out to whatever SMTP provider you use, over N hops and then back through the recipient's POP server ... yes, way more convenient then just sending it person to person via bluetooth !
When you put BOTH sides of the argument in real perspective, bluetooth doesn't seem quite so daunting does it ?
It'd be interesting to see the sources for your numbers. Ipod share is astronomical, but I doubt it's as high as 73% among all mp3 players. Any stats that put the iphone in 30% would have to be comparing from a "smart phone" perspective... while the iphone is in many ways not as "smart" as many dumbphones.
Either way, people predominately buy the iphone not because it's a smart phone, but because it's an apple phone. The same thing goes for the ipod, it's popular because people buy it for the status or some perceived quality that it doesn't have. I suspect that Mac sales are still in niche numbers apart from the rest because it's a larger investment, and because Mac computers are such a horrible deal. The amount that somebody pays extra for a Mac over a comparable intel compatible PC is usually more than the total cost of an iphone, or ipod.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I don't have an iphone or even use email on my phone but don't they have limitations on attachment file size? Don't many providers charge more for data service such as email?
Scrabble: $20
4x iPhone 3GS + iPad: $1300 (not including App)
Is paying upwards of 50 times as much really worth the cool factor? What about that a lot of board games need more than one sitting? Good thing you can run apps in the background I guess.
I just wish KGS would open up the protocol and let third parties create clients.
We could just wish that Apple opens up its products and let people run whatever they want on the iPhone and the iPad. KGS is very applish in its approach and Apple is very kgs-ish: both want total control on the user experience; you gain some polish but you lose flexibility and integration is often impossible.
Mario party also has less depth at the board level than most games you can buy at Target for $10, and good luck convincing Scrabble players that having to scroll around the board to trying to plan their strategy is an upgrade.
Now take something that is frequently at 27" (boardgames) and put them on a 10" screen.
And all of those games would be absolute hell to play on a screen the size of an iPad.
I'd like to point out that there's a difference between people who love boardgames and people who are unfun to play boardgames with because they go online and read the advice of people who sink 20 hours of math into calculating odds and value tables before coming over to your house for some casual fun on a Friday night.
I don't find any game very fun if most of the people involved are just looking to have some fun and one person is looking to end the game in 30 minutes with the most technically sound crushing imaginable. I guess you find people like that in every hobby though.
In the non-revised editions of Axis and Allies the Axis only had a 17% chance of winning because if they couldn't take London on the first turn the U.S. could land troops on the Eastern Front and the war was over. Tell that to people who have been playing it for years and they look at you in shock. Most of them would never have considered either move because what kind of WWII is that?
All the competitive Monopoly I see nowadays is profit vs. time, 1 vs.1 since well played longer games would never end with even three players who were each convinced not to let the third fall to their opponent.
Some games specifically allow cheating in the rules.
I'm glad that's a selling point.
A cardboard game can be lent to absolutely anyone and played by anyone they know in any way they can imagine with no accounts, logons, or additional purchases. You can even change the rules on the fly, or switch players, or stop and do something else because RealLife can handle more than one App running at a time. Then you can take the pieces from that game and combine them with another and make a totally new game!
It sounds stupid when talk about it as if you are buying the iPods and the iPad only for use as a board game (and the cheapest iPad will be $499 by the way). But if each player already has an iPod touch or iPhone (not unlikely), and one of the them has an iPad then it would make for a good platform. You're not even considering the advantages, like the 'board' in Scrabble could check spellings and automatically keep track of scores.
I don't think that's such good news. It will create a direct path from the web to the video driver and hardware. I'm pretty sure there are all kinds of exploits waiting to be found there...
To be fair, on an iPhone, you only need an e-mail address and a file to click with your finger. Most people don't walk around with a cell phone that has the 2G/3G radio disabled. Subjects are optional, and in both cases, the person would have to browse for the file. I'm not sure where you were going there with the smtp router path. You're talking milliseconds for each hop. Lets try to keep this little sub-topic in perspective.
I was actually fine with the first response, although it was a bit snarky. If that person doesn't want to e-mail it, then that's a perfectly acceptable answer.
I knew it. Most of the anti-iPad slashdotters naturally assume the OP is suggesting that the ONLY reason to get an iPad is for board games (that don't even exist yet). Don't they realize that their anti-iPad rhetoric is simply their anti-Apple bias shinning brightly?
If the iPad isn't for you, fine. You probably were never in Apple's sights anyway, and probably never will be. It does seem though that you can at least realize who it IS for. It's for my wife and people with her needs/wants, who lugs my MacBook off to work now & then to do some browsing, facebook, and email during the slow times. Who knows, when she gets her iPad she may even strike up a game of checkers with one of the other employees, over half of which own iPhones & iPods.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
... Which doesn't matter much if it's cheap and it's your second (or third) car.
.evom ton seod gis eht
Actually I'm a software developer, primarily video games and media. I've even done some work for Nintendo, which by the way started out and still continues to make hanafuda (a type of card game). Representing things virtually can often have advantages, but there are inherent advantages to physical advantages to some things which can far outweigh any advantages to be gained through virtualization. Particularly in the case of board games and cards, a large part of playing the game is the communal constructs of how each player understands the rules; and especially in the case of children interaction and organization of physical pieces is a large part of playing these games and efficient manipulation of the pieces is a learned skill. Software however has a pre-defined set of rules which the users can not deviate from, the software handles most of the game so there is little to no need to really learn or understand all the rules, and with no physical pieces a lot is lost in how people interact with the game.
I think you really need to think about what you find enjoyable about playing in general. When you play a video game you are thrust into being the player, your controls generally gave a direct effect on what is going on and the player is confined by the rules of the world which the programmer has set. However, when you were a child you most likely played with toys. Your toys were physical tokens you used to represent a world with constructs and rules you yourself defined. Your interaction with your toys was moving them around inside this world, and when your friends came to play it was a mish-mash of imaginations and physical objects. Board games in particular can be an extension to this for children, so revoking that and turning it into a very controlled set of numbers and images on a screen eliminates a large amount of value. More adult board games like Monopoly you'll note only have a suggested set of rules, the Monopoly rule book has list of rules you *can* use. I don't know about you, but I've played a lot of Monopoly and each time changing and adjusting the rules to the group you are playing with and the time frame you want to play the game in is a very large part of what makes it fun. Not to mention interacting with others and the game verbally and physically at the same time.
So when you say that things change I certainly hope you realize that not all changes are beneficial. Computerized board games are fine in some contexts, but when it comes to playing with others there is an inherent and real value to playing with physical objects together.
I'm a software developer, and have done a lot of work in the game and media software industry. You could call me a game developer and that would be accurate, but I've done and still do quite a bit more than that - including hardware (device) development. I've worked a lot with other game developers at many different companies and a lot of the time at the end of the week we end up playing billiards or Mahjong or cards. Not on the computer, not on a game system, with real physical objects. On top of that within the video game making process it's not at all uncommon to make physical representations of things, including drawing out maps, making dioramas, using little figures to represent players, and generally using the physical world as an anchor in the creative process.
If you are so determined to insist perfect virtual editions are just as good as the physical things they represent then that implies to me you do not truly understand their value to begin with. I can't wait to see how sterile and generic your kids turn out, perhaps unable to perceive the richness of the world around them and incapable of imagining with their hands, awkward in confrontation and communication with others. We are shaped by how we play, and learn how to enjoy the world around us by playing with it. Perhaps you didn't do enough of that, and that's why you enjoy the thought of having a bland, flat, streamlined analogue more than having the real physical set of objects.
Link to 1/2" thich, 1.5lb computer with 9.4" 1024x768 touch screen for less than $499....
Don't bother responding, there is no response.
And the people in Apples Economic demographic will pay the extra money for a much better engineered product. People who can not afford may well use the tablet with a lower quality touch screen and no applications designed to take advantage of it in a thicker heavier form factor because they can not afford the iPad. The people who can afford it and are looking for a mobile tablet device instead of some weird hacking platform will opt for the iPad.
"If you are so determined to insist perfect virtual editions are just as good as the physical things they represent " -You idiot! I hope your software code is better than your reading skills. I neversaid that at all. I was making the point that your comment was a stupid one to make on a tech site, and my point still stands.
And don't forget
"It's not wise to upset a Wookie!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Sales
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Yes. I was flabbergasted by some listener phoning in to a radio station, and exclaiming about how WONDERFUL an idea the iPad was, thanks to the touch screen. She had obviously never been exposed to a tablet PC in her life. Seriously, if the iPad is even the slightest bit successful, I will hold Apple users in even more disdain than I do currently. Which is quite a lot.
Playing poker with a joker and some Uno cards
And cardboard games don't come with DRM or restrictive rights where you don't actaully 'own' it, rather rent it and rebuy it when you magically lose the rights to the game. No thanks.
The cardboard game doesn't need DRM.
Tokens are swept up by the vacuum cleaner. The board is stained. The spine is broken.
The game is replaced.
What do you think has kept the Bicycle playing card company in business for 120 years?
With an iPad, you could save the game, put it back in your hand luggage, then get it out and resume the game in the taxi to the hotel.
There are times when I think Wall-E had the future pegged just about right.
It wouldn't hurt the geek to take his eyes away from the screen every now and again.
Right, so as long as you don't want to listen to Pandora or make a Skype call in the background, everything works fine. Well, you also can't watch Hulu in a window. Or watch Hulu at all. Or keep an SSH session open while you browse websites. Or download files using an SFTP client while you read your email.
Sweet now I can play my Twilight Imperium and Fully Expanded Arkham Horror without getting out my 500 plastic pieces and 40 decks of cards and 10 trackers for various things and 20 bags of different kinds of chips! I'm all for this guise
people are only happy with the simplicity aspect until the product they bought, with it's expectations to work as a normal computer, find out that it doesn't.
What do you tell people about multitasking? What do you tell people about why it can't run certain things just because apple won't let it? Etc.
I am really not sure how to react to this. It sounds really exciting as one can carry around many board games in just one small screen. But who plays board games all day long. The only fun part I see in this product would be the multi-touch feature to drag on screen. Other than that, I think this device is pointless. (I don't like board games anyways. I play a lot of chess and have a chess computer for that.) :)
File this one under "why you shouldn't consider wikipedia a source.": The entry quotes specific numbers (which are years old, btw) and then cites an apple blog as it's only reference. The cited reference at http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/06/05/24/ipod_how_big_can_it_get.html only uses conjecture to come to the conclusion that 10% of computer users use 1 or more ipod, which isn't impressive at all. Appleinsider doesn't state any numbers comparing ipod sales to overall portable media player sales (a quantity which would be hugely difficult to estimate in any case).
It would appear that wikipedia plagiarized their numbers and then cited a blog in lieu of the real source.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
On the contrary, I enjoy board games immensely. You seem to be forgetting the setting under which board games are usually played. Board games tend to come out at parties/family gatherings with kids present.
People at all-adult parties (I won't mention teen parties. Let's face it, whatever they're doing, it's not board games.) tend to socialize more than play games, especially small parties because those are usually friends wanting to catch up. And since most board games are for 2-8 players, larger parties are limited to games that scale up well like Pictionary or Scattergories.
Games tend to come out more when there are kids because kids need to be entertained or they get annoying, and they also tend to hate being left out of the group. And even excusing the tantrum throwers and mischief makers, kids are still kids. Greasy hands, spilled drinks/food, general clumsiness... Not good for an expensive electronic device.
So, unless you happen to go to a lot of parties without kids where board games always take center stage, I don't see how it's worth it.
So, unless you happen to go to a lot of parties without kids where board games always take center stage, I don't see how it's worth it.
Like I said, you've fallen for the "games are for kids" fallacy. I own a ton of board games for ages 12+, and most of my (age 30+) family and friends love to get together to play games. Games that are often way too complex for kids (not to mention that they're often in a foreign language).
A lot of people get together with 4-6 people and play games. A lot of couples love playing games. If there's a market for expensive games (and there is), then there can also be a market for expensive toys to play games on.
Though that screen is 1024 * 600, vs 1024 * 768 for the iPad.
In addition to being NON-capacitive (so sorry no multitouch) and having no native (non-USB) VGA-out to connect it to something bigger.
(As I said before)
That has 8 GB vs 16 GB for the smallest iPad.
On the other hand, given the hackability of the device, this is hardly even a consideration :
the flash memory is on a user accessible SD card, and today, even *class 10* 32gb sdhc aren't difficult to source.
Or USB memory keys if you're ready to sacrifice one of the internal USB ports.
I personally tend to immediately upgrade the flash of most devices I buy (smartphones, etc.)
On the contrary, I was rather pleasantly surprised that this device comes with some usable amount of flash.
(Most phones, cameras, etc. come packaged with something like 512 *me*-bibytes SD cards. Just in order to advertise that they packaged some memory. Hardly useful in practice)
It is cheaper, but it also comes with 'less' in some ways (for less money of course). ('More' in other ways too.)
Yup, and apparently Pojut and I happen not to value the same "mores" as Apple fan.
Once more proof that diversity (instead of monoculture) is important in a market place to cater to the needs of *all* and not only *most*.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Oh, now somebody is telling me what I wrote...
It's not that complicated: If you write something and someone else reads it, that other person is perfectly capable of telling you what it was you wrote.
If what you wrote isn't what you meant, that's your problem.
Bow-ties are cool.
Does this help?
Hmmm.. A wiener man. Does he own a hot dog stand?
Bow-ties are cool.
I didn't quote that because it's irrelevant to my point.
Sure, those few items can run in the background... but if I want to run two apps of my own choice at the same time, I'm not able to. Hence, functionally it is not capable of multi-tasking to me.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What is it with Slashdot and Technophiles?
I would say, several decades in hitech society can also show you bad side of technology and, and this is most important, show you where technology is not apropriate. Tabletop gaming is situation where technology is not apropriate. There it becomes distracting toy.
Anyhow
1&2) Space is not a inssue. You are not going to play dozens of different games, and you can easily spread different games across whole group. You can end up with party where there are half a dozen games and where noone owns more than one.
3) Setup/Teardown times is good. When you sit down with friends you are going to have smallchat while you sort pieces and setup board. If you are new to some group, it is time to get at ease. It is social activity that is not easily replaced by just starting program. Same goes for teardown.
4) Animations schmanimations, pointless and distracting. Pieces and tokens are bet off being abstract.
Blindly applying tech is not always an answer, especially when you deal with social stuff. You should learn that.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Am I the target demographic for the iPad? Not since it's details have been released, I'm not. I certainly was, but I'm not now.
The target demographic didn't change when you learned the details.
Like anyone can even know that
Apple isn't completely immune to consumer pressure.
Which is precisely why they aren't allowing multitasking. Consumer pressure is for a stable platform with long battery life.
Like anyone can even know that
Hmmm... let me think about this for a second... iPad - $600 4 iPhones (no contract) - $1600 Scrabble Board Game from Parker Bros. - $15 ... or, if you're one of those folks that absolutely has to go digital:
Scrabble Flash game from Pogo.com - Free
Something tells me that the only people willing to pay $2200 for a game of Scrabble will be Mac Fankids and other forms of idiot.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Cosmic Encounter rocks. The whole concept - a dead simple set of rules, with each player being able to break the rules - was innovative in its execution.
Haven't had any expansion packs since the late 80s though. Didn't even know it was still around. I wonder what the new ones are like... Maybe I'll have to break my set out again.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
board games for the ipad: www.gametableapp.com