Game Table: Classic board games for the Apple iPad | Hacker News Reader

Game Table: Classic board games for the Apple iPad

gametableapp.com

12 pointspieter12 comments

Chess and checker type board games I can see, but I'm not sure about card games. It would seem really hard to play and be able to see your hand without letting others see it and see the board if everyone has their hands on the pad. I'm interested in seeing how practical that is.

Accelerometer. Flip over about the horizontal axis? You'd have to be fast to ensure no peeking.

The iPad could act as table and any smart phone (iPhone/android) would connect to it with private set of hands/cards.

Mirrors!

I can picture a little 4-piece set of little shields with mirrored backs that serve to both obscure a player's private area, and make it easier for that player to see.

Will suction cups cause excessive wear for the touch-sensors?

> Thanks to the early tablet rumors, we got a huge jump on the development on Game Table. Game Table will be available on the iTunes App Store for an introductory price of 99 cents when the Apple iPad is released on April 3rd.

Ouch. I know some developers who are going to be unhappy with this... There's been some discussion about avoiding the "race to the bottom" that occurred with the iPhone/iPod touch and this zero-day $0.99 pricing is going to help ruin that.

That said, I was toying around with making something similar. It's even suggested as a use case in Apple's documentation for iPad developers. (Not an NDA thing anymore, it seems.) A table of pieces with no rules logic, but something more open ended. Looks like no point in supporting standard playing cards as part of it, since this app likely has that part covered.

EDIT: Just noticed eob's comment; custom pieces were what I was shooting for (sort of like a card equivalent to MotionX's former Dice Plus app), though with a more practical bent.

Suddenly I see a point for the iPad.

"Driving to Grandma's? No problems with Game Table!"

This is exactly the app that I first though of when the iPad was announced. Nice job for putting this together.

Here's what I would love to see in a version 2:

- Allow people to upload their own boards & pieces to some site. Or better yet, create a standard file format so anyone can host their own at any URL. This would allow all sorts of board games to be played without having to buy the often expensive sets of cardboard chips (fellow German boardgamers out there, you know what I'm talking about).

- Allow people to play games over the internet and save the games for later

A video showing one of the games would get me to want it more.

With the ability to zoom/pan, and add your own textures for back- and fore-grounds, this would also make the perfect pen-and-paper-and-miniatures RPG play surface.

Given the last word in your sentence, I assume you didn't know about this "surface" for D&D:

http://blogs.msdn.com/surface/archive/2009/12/16/new-gamepla...

Of course, $499 versus $15k is a big difference, but this shows some of the potential of a larger touch interface here.

I'm not sure this would scale to an iPad-sized surface. I also kinda like the free style GameTable allows you -- the Surface example (though very cool!) seems to take some control of the game out of you.

A D&D tool could be very nice -- just allow a DM to quickly sketch an area, add some characters and allow the players to interact. I think the killer feature would be playback of the battle/whatever, just keeping the history of where everybody moves.

If these things became cheap enough that everyone had one, each player could have a networked interface that had the game table in one panel/tab, the rules in another and their stats in a third. It'd almost be like an MMO UI, but operated manually.

Additionally, everyone could have a different view—the DM could be looking down a corridor that is "fog of war"-ed for the PCs. On the other hand, if everyone had a unified interface, all the iPads could be layed out together on the table to make one big surface, where scrolling one scrolled the others as well.

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