Hacker News Reader

I think it's less about the game mechanics and more about the viscerality. Board game players tend to prefer physical representations they can feel and fiddle with.

Exactly. Making the whole board a screen would take away from the experience. At that point you could just play one of the digital versions that exist.

They don't have to be if you strictly play the standard, 4 person variant.

I'm guessing this person hopes to eventually support other variants - which take significantly varying shapes.

Because you could have various different board shapes. The board game comes with various extensions that change the board shape and structure.

I think they are suggesting that not just the tiles can be rendered, but also the shape of the board. You can have the edges around the board just be a dead zone, so it fits into a standard rectangular TV/monitor.

But then the overall shape is defined by the size of the screen. Especially with Settlers, the actual game board is often a function of “how many tiles we got” and “how big is our table “.