This New Gaming Console Wants to Replace Your Board Game Collection
Meeple Mountain’s founder, Andy Matthews, spent some time last fall with Harris Hill Products, Inc., the team behind the new gaming device Board. After Andy finished the demo, he reached out to me because I do a lot of gaming-as-a-family nights at the Bell household with my wife and two kids, ages 12 and 9.
I looked at the brief Board commercial on the company’s home page, and while the video was certainly splashy, I initially did not want to wade into the waters here. “My only question,” I started in a note to Andy, “revolves around the games…the games don’t necessarily look like board games so much as video games.” Don’t get me wrong—I play video games every week, sometimes every day. But the Board looked like an oversized iPad that used physical components to manipulate the screen, in a similar fashion to Beasts of Balance.
I’m a tabletop games reviewer, not a video game reviewer, so I wanted to make sure everyone knew who they were asking about doing a review here. Still, I knew the kids would get a kick out of trying Board, so I volunteered to give this a go. About a month later, the Board showed up in a box so loud that the company’s logo was splashed across the front: “BOARD”, it read, in a large, white font.
Because the timing was so close to Christmas, we decided to include this as a gift from “Santa” (we still have the hooks in our 9-year-old on the mysteries of Santa Claus), so my wife and I stashed the Board as a gift under the tree. After we opened all our other gifts, we pulled out the Board.
“What is this?” said the 9-year-old. He ripped off the wrapping paper, and within minutes, the Board was set up on our living room coffee table, ready to roll.
Over a six-week span that included time both at our home and on a road trip to Atlanta, Board proved to be a resilient tool in our quest to keep the kids engaged. That’s because I was both right and wrong about what Board is. Board is a board game platform. It’s also a video game platform. And it’s more accurate to simply describe the device as something all families need more of these days: a chance to bring people physically together to play games.