Arcade1Up's Infinity Game Table: Board games on demand [EXCLUSIVE first look] By CNET

Here's, a new twist on family game night, a giant touch screen table with digital versions of board games, we're talking big name board games like monopoly and scrabble, and you can play against anyone from anywhere online. This is the infinity game table by arcade one up, and I have here an exclusive first look at an early prototype to let you see how it works. So, let's play, I should start by making it clear that this game table is still in development. It was very cool of arcade one up to. Let me spend a couple of days playing with a prototype with my family at home, but that means the graphics and effects that you see here are not final everything's still being tweaked. Now, on the surface, it's a pretty simple concept.

You make a giant tablet with legs. You load it up with a bunch of well-known tabletop games and gather around to play with your family. Just like you would, with any board game except no pieces to set up no cards to deal. No one has to be banker. You just dive right in the infinity game table found success on Kickstarter, with more than one million dollars pledged to bring it to life, and the first tables are coming out next month.

The price starts at six hundred dollars, it's about the same as a high-end iPad. Now there are two options for the screen size. There is a 32-inch screen and a 24-inch model, that's the one I tested or if you want to measure it another way, you could say it takes up roughly seven boxes of games. The table is sturdy. It's got some weight to it.

You can take the legs off. If you want, I used a power cord, but there is an option for a battery pack and there are also ports to expand gameplay in different ways. Hasbro worked with arcade one up to have its board games turned into digital versions for this system. There are titles for all ages and the team took some creative approaches to re-imagine how a game could play in a digital way. You may be wondering how do you play operation on a touch screen? Well, they made it a finger maze with varying degrees of difficulty, hit the edge and the table buzzes with a vibration.

The sound of the patient's heartbeat picks up to give you more anxiety. Different games will rumble the table for different reasons. If you're playing pop-o-matic trouble, the table is going to vibrate when you tap that bubble to roll your die and animations send your pegs flying around the track. These animations are where the team can get really creative. The design of monopoly was well done.

Your little token hops around the dice you roll could knock over the little houses or the other tokens on the board, but the best is when someone gets sent to jail. I think this was the fastest monopoly I ever played, because no one had to deal with banking or cards it all just flowed. You know. One of the great things about the nostalgia of board games is all the tangible memories, the feel of the token pieces, the shuffling of the cards, the roll of the dice with digital. You don't get any of that, but, of course, if the graphics are just right, they could still bring back those memories but digitally enhance the game and give you a way to play that you can't get with a board game.

A key feature is that you can play against people online. That is, if you know, someone else that also has an infinity game table. I hopped into a game of battleship with the table's design director Jerry Cummings holy cow. You got me already when you sink your opponent in battleship, you're going to feel the explosion in some games with multiple players. Like sorry, we could have connected with multiple tables if we wanted to and if there's no time to finish, you can also save a game to pick it up later.

Games will have various settings in case you want to change the house rules. Jerry said the team is considering all sorts of new gameplay ideas. Maybe you'll use special controllers in one game or another game could be switched to play. A different themed version like a Star Trek monopoly or a Disney trivia pursuit table cell has a lot of potential. It really does it's its it's the first time that you can take a board game.

The way you play a board game face to face, but now it's digital, and you don't have to worry about any parts or anything and everything's taken care of all the rules are in there and all you have to do is launch it. Arcade one up is working on other titles, popular with board game fans like the game ticket to ride or pandemic. This goes beyond Hasbro. The system is designed to be open for developers to create anything they want for the table. The unit I tested also had card games, as well as your basic classics like checkers and chess.

Once I took it for a spin, I could see a few different paths that this system could take. Why not make a game of chess where you saw the pieces battle each other or maybe games can react differently depending on how you touch the screen. When I played candy land, I wondered what it would be like if my daughter saw her player slog through the gooey licorice lagoon, or could she get reactions if her finger bounced on the gumdrops? The prototype demo was not quite there yet, but the team says they want to keep updating these games over time. This table holds a lot of potential. It really all comes down to how game developers can think differently about playing games on this type of surface, whether it's people near or far really, it all depends on what game developers can bring to the table.

Source : CNET