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What do you think of the gamechanger?
There must be a ton of skirmish games that can use this for some interesting ground and floor and stuff instead of just using a green blanket or whatever. Has anyone else backed this? I figure I could use some of my terrain like trees, outposts and stuff to make some real interesting areas to fight in.
I might get a bridge and see if I can find an animated river for it to flow over. That would look awesome! The link is here. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/richardwoodfield/gamechanger-virtual-tabletop-gaming-surface

With the limit of a 42" diagonal screen, you really are quite limited to small-map skirmish games. It's a very cool idea, and looks very nicely done. I'm particularly impressed by the 'modularity' of the system, where you can upgrade to touch later, or just start with a basic 'frame' on your purchase.

On the other hand, I'm running Pathfinder every week, and I am hard pressed to remember a SINGLE game where a fight didn't spill over the edges of a single 27"x34" sheet (which would be a 43" screen). We just finished a fight on a 64"x64" set of sheets. I suppose I could have used it for the dungeon crawl areas, but even then, I had a long-range mage who would really, really, prefer to blast people from the end of a hallway. MapTools or something similar will let you scroll, or resize of course, but if you are using miniatures on top of the screen, that isn't an option. If your group is committed to using 'in-app' tokens, then you are set, and I think this would be a better purchase for your game.

At that point, however, you've removed your original skirmish miniatures from the equation and are just using the ruleset. That might make it good for things like Necromunda and Mordhiem, which no longer have miniatures in production. However, if people want to actually have miniatures, you would need to make SURE that your games NEVER played on a board bigger than about 26"x34". That's entirely possible, but I don't know myself of a skirmish game which consistently adheres to that size.

jamin wrote:
What do you think of the gamechanger?
There must be a ton of skirmish games that can use this for some interesting ground and floor and stuff instead of just using a green blanket or whatever. Has anyone else backed this? I figure I could use some of my terrain like trees, outposts and stuff to make some real interesting areas to fight in.
I might get a bridge and see if I can find an animated river for it to flow over. That would look awesome! The link is here. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/richardwoodfield/gamechanger-virtual-tabletop-gaming-surface

Really interesting, but weird that the video did not show it in, you know, use. One would think that the KS video would show it being used in real time.

I like this, I can see LCD tabletops being commonplace in the future come to think of it, and this is certainly moving in that direction. Gret idea, I recommend changing the title of the thread. Vague thread titles on actual forums are the worst, this isn't Reddit.

 scuzz_bucket wrote:
I like this, I can see LCD tabletops being commonplace in the future come to think of it, and this is certainly moving in that direction. Gret idea, I recommend changing the title of the thread. Vague thread titles on actual forums are the worst, this isn't Reddit.

The technology will be around for sure, and will open up a lot of possibilities for game play and game design. I don't think it will ever kill the hands on aspects of the hobby though. And I'm not sure how useful it would be for Wargaming, at least insofar as three dimensional terrain remains an important element of game play.

I am reminded of Egon telling Janine, "Print is dead."

Still really cool stuff. I just wish it were bigger, although for d&d 32" is probably sufficient since you can scroll the map. I think you'd want a touch screen that would allow you to move tokens and interface with cell phone/tablet apps that keep track of character records. That would be tits.

weeble1000 wrote:

 scuzz_bucket wrote:
I like this, I can see LCD tabletops being commonplace in the future come to think of it, and this is certainly moving in that direction. Gret idea, I recommend changing the title of the thread. Vague thread titles on actual forums are the worst, this isn't Reddit.

The technology will be around for sure, and will open up a lot of possibilities for game play and game design. I don't think it will ever kill the hands on aspects of the hobby though. And I'm not sure how useful it would be for Wargaming, at least insofar as three dimensional terrain remains an important element of game play.

I am reminded of Egon telling Janine, "Print is dead."

Still really cool stuff. I just wish it were bigger, although for d&d 32" is probably sufficient since you can scroll the map. I think you'd want a touch screen that would allow you to move tokens and interface with cell phone/tablet apps that keep track of character records. That would be tits.

I would want to use it in conjunction with physical terrain such as trees, hills, and buildings. Having that on top of rivers that flow, critters that scurry around, and grass that waves in the breeze would be awesome. Not to mention the possibilities for having rulebooks, lists, etc incorporated into the table itself for quick reference.

 scuzz_bucket wrote:

weeble1000 wrote:

 scuzz_bucket wrote:
I like this, I can see LCD tabletops being commonplace in the future come to think of it, and this is certainly moving in that direction. Gret idea, I recommend changing the title of the thread. Vague thread titles on actual forums are the worst, this isn't Reddit.

The technology will be around for sure, and will open up a lot of possibilities for game play and game design. I don't think it will ever kill the hands on aspects of the hobby though. And I'm not sure how useful it would be for Wargaming, at least insofar as three dimensional terrain remains an important element of game play.

I am reminded of Egon telling Janine, "Print is dead."

Still really cool stuff. I just wish it were bigger, although for d&d 32" is probably sufficient since you can scroll the map. I think you'd want a touch screen that would allow you to move tokens and interface with cell phone/tablet apps that keep track of character records. That would be tits.

I would want to use it in conjunction with physical terrain such as trees, hills, and buildings. Having that on top of rivers that flow, critters that scurry around, and grass that waves in the breeze would be awesome. Not to mention the possibilities for having rulebooks, lists, etc incorporated into the table itself for quick reference.

Interesting idea, but wouldn't you wind up obscuring a great deal of the surface? I'd also be worried about scratching up. I wonder if it also incorporates sound effects. You can probably write a program for it that does. That would be neat. In theory, you could also use it for templates, but again if you had lots of terrain on it such functionality would be limited.

I like the idea, but the tablet needs a good protection against scratches, it would also be nice if RFID tags were used for identifying figures and terrain.

Back when flat screen TVs started to become cheap, we did something like this for a friends coffee/board game table. We took a 55" flat screen and laid it on its side. Built a wood frame to contain the TV with an edge for putting drinks (think we did 6" all around). The surface was a sheet of 1/4" glass to protect the screen that we mounted into a rabbet on the edging. The overall size was around 5' x 4' and about 24" tall. It was connected as the secondary display for his laptop. Little drawers under the TV held tokens, Monopoly money, dice and other game related stuff.

We could go ahead and load up static images of different board game boards, and use the tokens and what not just like a regular board game (without fear of things getting bumped as easily). He also did some dynamic stuff using flash to do games without any actual physical pieces.

This was years ago and apparently he has since hooked it up to use his tablet instead of the laptop, and is working on writing some group play apps for games like Scrabble where each player would have their own device that shows hidden stuff and the board that deals with pieces in play.

We've been looking for just this kind of thing for a few years. I hope I can find a cheap 42" telly to try this with.