CMON and Xplored Announce New Digital Board Game Console
CMON and Xplored are teaming up to bring players the next evolution in board gaming. Teburu is a gaming console that seamlessly integrates the physical and digital worlds, keeping players focused on the board and its components while the system takes care of game rules, enemies’ behavior, and storytelling events.
Groundbreaking technology senses where figures representing heroes, monsters and other gameplay elements are anywhere on the board. This information is transmitted seamlessly to any compatible tablet or computer running the Gamemaster App – no more hunting around in the rulebook. Make your move and the Gamemaster tells you what happens next.
Players can keep track of their own characters on Companion Apps running on their own smartphones networked to the Gamesmaster App, which is able to throw surprises at players with a malevolent intelligence never before seen in boardgames. What’s behind the door? The Gamemaster knows…
Roll the wireless dice anywhere, and Teburu does all the heavy lifting, taking into consideration player and monster statistics, equipment and other modifiers and displaying the final result instantly. No more math, just shoot zombies (with your dice)!
The first game on Teburu will be Zombicide Evolution – Las Vegas. It’s the game millions of Zombicide players the world over know and love, but evolved – faster, enhanced, and with a great campaign full of meaningful choices that will carry over a series of gaming sessions.
CMON’s CEO, Chern Ann Ng commented, “We are excited to bring new technology and gameplay innovations to tabletop games in the form of the Teburu. We expect this will both excite existing tabletop gamers and draw a whole new audience into tabletop gaming.”
Xplored’s Founder and CEO, Davide Garofalo noted, “CMON immediately understood the groundbreaking potential of our technology applied to board games, allowing us to bring an ambitious product to life. We strongly believe Teburu is the paradigm change this market has been looking for.”
Players will get their first chance to try the Teburu gaming system at Gen Con this August at the CMON booth (#417). Participants will be able to try out this new, fully-integrated style of gaming with demos of Zombicide Evolution – Las Vegas.
This will never succeed, at least not this iteration.
Problems:
A - It's a hassle (more setup, more hoops to jump through turn to turn, making sure minis register and dice come up correctly, connection issues)
B - It's going to be expensive as hell
C - Its titles will be limited (CMON only?)
I'm eager to see all the threads pop up after this delivers detailing all of the bugs.
I'm probably one of the most receptive here to the concept of digitizing some of this stuff, but not like this.
The only way something like this would succeed would be a surface mat that provides digital boards/tracks/etc for you to play on top of without requiring anything else electronic. It would need to have a large swathe of games and have a robust module for users to create additional content.
As a general rule, I don't like media that desperately tries to be other media. You want your video game to be a movie? I'd rather watch a movie.
You want your board game to be like a video game? I already have TONS of video games and they are better than your board game hybrid.
I partake in board games for their social aspects, not so everyone can stare at their phones or wait for the iPad to puke out some tinny sound effects and "gripping" story bits.
My board games never need to be updated, charged, synced, etc.
Now, after that "get off my lawn" bit, I will say that the thought of playing a traditional miniatures game in VR completely appeals to me. Being able to virtually paint my virtual collection, virtually manipulate them on virtual terrain, etc. Give me that now.
This is total garbage and I can’t resist another opportunity to dunk on it.
Apps work best as assists- the Gloomhaven tracker or Roll20 for example. Not as a platform or format. Anything else is a gimmick, and this thing really doesn’t do anything fundamentally different than what Dark Tower was doing almost 40 years ago with about 50 cents worth of Radio Shack electronics.
It is going to be expensive, and as shown in the video each player has a mobile device and there is main tablet. I’m betting $500-$700 for the board at a minimum, which won’t include those devices or the copy of Zombicide Enhanced you’ll have to buy.
I just have to laugh at it being a CMON thing...like they have ever come up with a design complex enough to require computer assistance.
This kind of thing has already failed multiple times- Golem Arcana, World of Yoho...even FFG’s more successful attempts at this have been tentative and really kind of largely swept aside over time. If there were truly demand for this kind of thing, we’d already have it.
The whole thing reeks of coming from a meeting with an out-of-touch CEO or investor am pitching the idea of a “tabletop games console”...right down to the nonsensical bullshit product name.
I don’t even really give a shit about all of this fatuous “potential” it supposedly represents for designers. Designers today can’t even get a handle on how to express basic themes and innovative concepts in the format, let alone with a device that encourages more crossover into video games territory.
I can’t possibly hard pass on this more...I used to think apps were the future, now I’d rather just play a great Knizia game that explores the limits and boundaries of the format than pursue some pie in the sky bullshit like this.
The last thing we need is something that eliminates the last vestiges of math from our lives.
ubarose wrote: Maybe their market is game cafes/clubs/stores. A place by us that charges a fee to play was considering getting a giant tablet table that just displays maps and terrain for D & D and tabletop mini games.
I don't know the game cafe business or anything, but if I owned one I would not want this. I'd be worried patrons would damage/steal bits and pieces, and if you lose the chipped dice or they get damaged - how the hell do you replace them?
And even if they pull it off perfectly, hard pass from me. Something that works on a device I already have (i.e. companion app on my phone), I'll consider. I don't need another big lump of hardware in my house.
RobertB wrote: Yeah, them newfangled horseless carriages will never work.
Some of you folks going to Gencon should go look at it and report back.
I think the eventually successful version of this looks a lot more like an expanded tabletop simulator, perhaps with some VR-ish hardware. I'm still very skeptical that mobile platforms haven't already solved this problem for the market that wants digital board games.
Vysetron wrote: Remember Golem Arcana?
No.
Here's the bigger truth -- you can do every damn thing that this huge hardware package is trying to do with a couple of smartphones on tripods. You can image process damn near everything with a couple of angles of view, and I'd wager 80% of games played today have two smartphones within a couple of feet of them. Zero hardware purchase, same capabilities.
Don't believe me? There's a guy in Russia that just released a scoring app for Ticket to Ride (original and Europe) where all you do is photograph the board at the end of the game. All routes are totaled and scored, longest route, it asks each player for their Destination Tickets with their most likely tickets listed first, based on the positions of their pieces on the board. One photograph.
That was literally one young guy in his bedroom doing the programming, and he's releasing it at no charge. Sure it's sending your location to the GRU, but they probably have it already. The damn thing works, based off of one photograph! It's pretty damn impressive.
A game company could sell a cardboard game, and an app that comes with it and replicate 100% of the functionality of this exceptionally complicated set of hardware components. If they're crazy CMON will release a first game using it. That's as far as it will ever go, and sure as hell no other game manufacturer is going to license it.
The day someone releases an SDK for vision-enhanced-gaming software the market changes.
Michael Barnes wrote: But dude, it makes a sound when you open a door.
You know, that promo video was hokey as hell. I particularly liked the animation of the electricity zooming up the dedicated wire between the space on the board and the cpu. And the explosion diagrams with the battery and the usb ports labeled.
IA however works as three different games in one. A 1 vs 4 campaign, a 1v1 skirmish, and a app vs 4 campaign. But with this I have to ask why? From what I can tell this does exactly what the Imperial Assault app does (translate pre-programmed cards into actions for the monsters, and trigger events). So why does this need to be a full console? Hell the IA app is FREE.
Interesting, so like a group of geeky grad student EE majors that developed the sensor mat and tried to spin up their own business? Makes sense as that is the age group for a game like Zombicide.Sagrilarus wrote: Great question, and if you read the promotional materials it appears that a hardware company showed up at their door and presented them with the idea. That is, CMoN is a partner in another company's product.
In that case the best to them, even if I'm not interested. I'm not sure that a full console with a hand held for each character and a single use tablet CPU is the way to go on this. Better for them to develop the sensor mat and pair it with a USB connector so that folks could connect their (already owned) laptop or Android.
And if you have to pair each sensor with what it is in the game it's going to flop. I'll stick with IA. I have no problems perusing character sheets, tracking wounds, and tapping inventory and skill cards.
However I could see this as a replacement for the massive kickstarters out there. Gloomhaven, Shadows over Brimstone, etc. Just not Zombicide.