International Tabletop Day is a celebration of one of the greatest of human inventions – playing games together. When you gather with friends around your favorite board and tabletop games, you’ll be taking part in a tradition that goes back thousands of years, when games such as Go and Senetwere invented.
Over their lifetime, board and tabletop games have changed very little, as far as the way they are played. However, as with all the things, change is inevitable and augmented reality (AR) is one of the prime mechanisms leading the way. Let’s take a look at five devices at the forefront of this AR change to tabletop gaming.
HOLOGRID: MONSTER BATTLES
The idea of AR has been around since the early 1900s, but it was in the movie Star Wars: A New Hope, in the scene where Chewbacca and R2D2 are playing a chess-like game with holographic creatures (dejarik), where the world got to see what AR was, and what it is finally coming to be.
Phil Tippett is the creator of that miniature monster chess game and has since used his supreme visual effects skills to make more creatures come to life in iconic geek movies such as Dragonslayer,RoboCop, and Starship Troopers. In 2016, Tippett Studio partnered with Happy Giant to create and publish the HoloGrid: Monster Battle, which was successfully funded via Kickstarter with the help of 824 backers and over $100,000 raised.
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But LGB is more than just a game mat with multiple AR games at hand. LGB was designed to also be the world’s first AR mobile game publishing platform. The LGB software developer’s kit (SDK) for Unity and Vuforia is free to download from the game website, and you are invited to publish your games on the LGB game store. The LGB games currently available are few, with more on the way. In the meantime, you could be taking advantage of the LGB SDK to create and publish your own AR games.
GAME-ON
The GAME-ON AR tabletop game system uses specially-designed playing cards created by GAME-ONcreator Damien Lopez, and the Aurasma app developed by Hewlett-Packard. According to the GAME-ON Kickstarter page and this Reddit post, Lopez is creating GAME-ON to be a full-fledged gaming system akin to Live Game Board, but using special playing cards as the AR medium.
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Genesis AR players take on the roles of six drifters: Baron, Osirus, Tyran, Aurora, Erebus, and Alatus. Each character has their own skills, equipment, and origin story, and can be summoned to fight each other in AR with the cards and your mobile devices.
For a limited time, the Genesis Augmented Reality Starter Pack is available for pre-order on the website. The Pack includes “2x Random Genesis characters, Single Player Horde Mode & Rose Aurora Skin”.
CASTAR
Probably the most high profile device on this list, CastAR (developed by Technical Illusions) is coming at AR in a different way compared to the previous companies. Instead of viewing AR through mobile devices, it’s building on the current trend that virtual reality is on, but with actual eyewear in place of full headsets. No playing cards, no game mats.
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Source: Geek & Sundry