Prepare to empty your wallets!

[Purplepeopleeater]

[Romans832]

Nice find!

[Guest]

Looks like the kind of pioneer product that fails miserably, but then is revived in a few years by a more capable company. Give it time, I think the pokemon version of this would be awesome, but that linked "genesis" game looks terrible.

[PourSpelur]

I can't wait for the first good AR minis game.

[Duckman]

And here, I looked at this and said GW should have been doing this 5 years ago when Microsoft first introduced the gametable idea.

 

Buy your mini and put it on the table and you have access to the unit.  You'd eliminate the substitutions entirely (although you'd have to figure out how to handle/allow conversions)....  I've got ideas but since GW is too narrow minded (and too tech-inept) to see this market in the first place it is not worth trying to sell it to them.  This would make game tables simpler too...

 

Need to move those trees so your block of infantry can try to move through them?  Nope, just build a nice looking table with rolling hills, trees, resin (or water) rivers and lakes...  You name it...  A figure projected on top of it has no problems staying upright, staying in ranks, getting damaged...

 

You could allow hobby with digital images or modified digital images or stock images...  No more "unpainted" armies, play on any surface you wanted...  Boundaries or no...  It'd be so simple to set up...

[Brick Bungalow]

I've seen previous integrations of smartphone and board game with mixed results. It's a fun gimmick but you still need good game design. I can't really tell if it's just a fighting game with an alternate interface or if there is more strategy to it. I'd agree that something like pokemon could work really well. 

[Guest]

You could allow hobby with digital images or modified digital images or stock images...  No more "unpainted" armies, play on any surface you wanted...  Boundaries or no...  It'd be so simple to set up...

Digital images....like the ork dreadnought featured in the 2nd ed starter box...? (Center, GW "image" dreadnought....)

 

Personally, switching to all digital seems like a step back, not forward.

[andy]

I think the best integration of app and game I've seen is the virtual gamemaster for the Werewolf/Villager games. It does a good job of freeing up one player from having to run the game -- though it does a poor job of noticing when some scoundrel is peeking.

[Guest]

Original Post

Didn't mean to be so negative with my first reply. It is a neat find. Thanks for sharing.

[Duckman]

Personally, switching to all digital seems like a step back, not forward.

 

I'm not sure I would call moving to digital a step backwards necessarily.  I see it having a potential impact on the hobby aspect of conversion and painting and that is not the goal.  I have ideas about how to handle things like that which would certainly facilitate the hobby aspect and might even be made to reward it.  I didn't bother to put the details out because they're not something I every worked through to completion mostly because it was not worth putting out there since GW has shown zero interest in moving beyond a table with miniatures for a cat to jump on.

 

Personally, I would love to see really nice tables with high-quality terrain on them (moar hobby!) which don't make moving models difficult or impractical.  This is less an issue for 40k but is huge for rank-and-file stuff.  The "holographic" model from original post would make a huge difference in this.  The key is figuring out how to use that to benefit the hobby, not to replace it.  You still want to reward modeling, conversion, painting, etc.  At the same time you could use this to raise the lowest level for armies as well...  Everyone still has to buy a "model" (or maybe a card or maybe the card comes in the box by default) to even be able to put the unit on the table (i.e. no change to the GW financial model for better or worse) but then instead of putting an unpainted model on the table you could put a default, three-color (digital) model on the table but also allow a user to convert, paint and upload a series of images to replace the default model, etc.  You could *also* allow digital modeling and conversion.

[savion47]

I really love the idea of what can be done with AR, but I don't see myself holding my phone up high enough to point at the table where the cards are for any real length of time.

[Guest]

I'm not sure I would call moving to digital a step backwards necessarily.  I see it having a potential impact on the hobby aspect of conversion and painting and that is not the goal.  I have ideas about how to handle things like that which would certainly facilitate the hobby aspect and might even be made to reward it.  I didn't bother to put the details out because they're not something I every worked through to completion mostly because it was not worth putting out there since GW has shown zero interest in moving beyond a table with miniatures for a cat to jump on.

 

Personally, I would love to see really nice tables with high-quality terrain on them (moar hobby!) which don't make moving models difficult or impractical.  This is less an issue for 40k but is huge for rank-and-file stuff.  The "holographic" model from original post would make a huge difference in this.  The key is figuring out how to use that to benefit the hobby, not to replace it.  You still want to reward modeling, conversion, painting, etc.  At the same time you could use this to raise the lowest level for armies as well...  Everyone still has to buy a "model" (or maybe a card or maybe the card comes in the box by default) to even be able to put the unit on the table (i.e. no change to the GW financial model for better or worse) but then instead of putting an unpainted model on the table you could put a default, three-color (digital) model on the table but also allow a user to convert, paint and upload a series of images to replace the default model, etc.  You could *also* allow digital modeling and conversion.

I do think GW would be smart to get a non-tabletop digital product going strong. If they had their goals together, they could make a really awesome online, digital game, which function both to reinforce copyright and to make lots of money. That said, I don't really see this happening, ever, unless it's a fluke. GW just doesn't seem to be that focused on making money, despite claims.

 

As for holographic terrain and models, I mean, yeah, I expect a Star Wars New Hope style round chess game to be invented at some point. I don't really think it would benefit this hobby, to have digital components, but it may happen anyway. I wouldn't be that surprised if GW, at some point, developes a 3d printer for their kits, where you buy them and print them yourself, but you have pay for each one as if you had bought it from a store. You know, so shipping and manufacturing is cheaper for GW, but there isn't actually a drop in price for the consumer.

 

Though the main challenge with most of these games, is that the game can only sell if there is a supportive gaming community with a regular gaming meet-up location (like a game store). So in all gaming costs, the game company has to take into account that they need to make sure the community survives enough to raise more gamers. Despite reputation, I do think GW considers this. So even with AR games, you'd still need to create a way for the gamers to socialize and build the hobby. 

 

With that Gensis game above, looks like the sort of thing where they intend to sell both a physical version and a digital version (not unlike those skylander toys). And if they do it in a manner that allows speciality businesses and communities to form around their creation, like a game store, then the game itself will likely last. But if they don't design it in a manner, where others can profit from it, then it will likely die.