The board game sector is experiencing an explosion of creativity and connection with technology, with dozens of games that combine the use of cardboard and plastic with applications. In addition, they have a strong niche with Tabletop simulator. Now the union between board games and technology hopes to go one step further with the All on Board project from The Game Kitchen, creators of Blasphemous.
The Spanish studio wants to go all out with its new All on Board virtual reality board game platform. Clearly they are inspired by the success of TableTop Simulator, but with their game they seek to create a more refined version, and designed from scratch to be used with virtual reality glasses.
All On Board is postulated as the perfect way to play board games in Virtual Reality
The Game Kitchen has crowdfunded via Kickstarter, and is well on its way to getting basic funding to get ahead. The objective at the moment is around €25.000, which according to the creators, It will serve to hire more people to fully develop the platform. They will see their main source of income from the sale of licensed board games, so that only one person will have to have the game license for the rest of their friends to play.
At the moment they have already confirmed that they have around twelve licensed games, among which are dense games like Black Rose Wars and Sword & Sorcery, along with a lighter one like Istanbul. More games will be announced as the Kickstarter campaign progresses.
In the event that the licensed games are not to our liking, they have announced the possibility of modding, which would allow an almost unlimited number of table games, as long as the players dedicate themselves to adding them. For now we have the history of TableTop Simulator which has thousands of games of all kinds, even improved and translated versions of games that would otherwise never exist. It will be the main impetus for this new platform to please today's gamers.
To this is added some mod tools that allow you to create interactions without using code, which would allow All on Board to automate the most complicated parts of shift passing without having to actually write them in code. This will also allow prototyping board games that could later see their printed version, as well as getting a little more promotion by putting the game on the platform.
They have confirmed the development for Steam VR and Meta Quest, with a crossplay function between them, They already warn that, due to licensing problems; the games we own on one platform we will not own on the other and we would have to buy it twice. That can be an annoyance that they themselves admit in the comments of the campaign. But it is the publishers and distributors of the games themselves who end up deciding thereon.
