After entrepreneur Brynn Putnam sold her smart fitness company, Mirror, to Lululemon for $500 million in 2020, she was looking for her next big idea. It was the middle of the pandemic, and Putnam was living with five kids ranging in age from 2 to 21. She says she often found herself dreaming of an activity that would get her whole family to sit down and connect with each other.
“When we played games, we were either playing board games like Candyland, so that the littlest ones could participate, or we would try to play video games, but the teenagers who’ve logged a lot of hours on sort of modern controllers would always smoke us,” Putnam says. “There was a missing product: one that could give you the tactile feel of physical pieces and the face-to-face interaction of sitting around a shared experience, but with the interactivity of video games.”
Enter Board, Putnam’s newest venture. Board is a 24-inch game console that looks a bit like a gigantic iPad. Its function, though, is unlike pretty much any other device on the market: Board combines the setup and feel of a traditional board game with the digital screen of a video game, allowing players to use physical pieces on top of an interactive screen.
The console comes with 12 exclusive games and can accommodate up to 10 players in a team setting. It debuted on October 28 for a holiday price of $499, though its standard cost is $699. While the Board team wouldn’t share sales data, they did note that the product already surpassed initial forecasts.
To make Board’s premise work, Putnam’s team designed its own custom hardware and software that can identify different kinds of touch, withstand rough play and spills, and react in real time to players’ movements. For Putnam, Board represents an entirely new way to use tech; rather than isolating its users, Board is built to provide a social experience.
How Board built a brand-new kind of game
Creating Board started with one major hurdle, says Ryan Measel, the company’s chief technology officer: Most touchscreens are only built to recognize 10 fingers—and they’re certainly not designed to recognize objects. Board needed to identify not only an unlimited number of fingers, but also the console’s 49 unique game pieces.
Measel explains that, with commercial platforms like Android and iOS, there’s a programming layer that limits how many touch points—like taps and swipes—a developer can build into an application. With Board, Measel’s team built a custom driver that gave them full access to the console’s sensor array, opening up essentially endless possibilities for different interactions with the screen.
Specifically, the Board screen is able to determine what’s touching it (and how) through an embedded AI model that’s been trained on the system’s sensory outputs. It knows, for instance, how to distinguish between a hand accidentally brushing the board, a finger tapping the screen, and an arm passing over the board. It can also tell the difference between all 49 of the console’s game pieces using conductive traces, or unique patterns made out of a conductive material, that are etched onto the bottom of every piece.
Alongside the Board’s unique ability to distinguish touch, Putnam says, a top concern was the console’s durability—especially given that some of its games are designed to be enjoyed by players as young as six. The device comes with a spill-resistant gasket around the display and a tight internal structure to keep it safe from liquids and bumps.
“My littlest one is 2, so she tends to use everything as a weapon,” Putnam says. “We have some great photos and videos from the testing process at the factory of the Board being submerged underwater, dropped from very high heights, and scratched multiple times.”
How Board works
When users receive their Board, the device comes with 12 games made specifically for the console, as well as unique pieces tailored to each game. Seth Sivak, Board’s chief creative officer and former CEO of the game studio Proletariat, led game development. He says the console’s portfolio of games was carefully crafted specifically to offer something for all different kinds of players.
The options run the gamut from 60-second-long arcade-inspired games to an escape room-themed experience that can take up to 90 minutes to complete. Even within the games themselves, players of different ages and skill levels can find roles appropriate to them—like in the chef-inspired game Chop Chop, where the kind of utensil game piece chosen by each participant determines their role in the kitchen.
“The 2 year old can be the sponge and feel a lot of joy cleaning the kitchen, but it’s very simple and intuitive for them to do,” Putnam says. “The grown-up can be in charge of managing the order tickets as they come in and strategizing about how to navigate the changing kitchen layout, recipes, and tickets. I think that’s really hard to do—there’s not a ton of experiences that really make sure everyone has a seat at the table.”
Right now, Sivak and his team are working to build out Board’s IP into additional games. At the same time, Putnam says the company is working on making its software development kit available to external developers in order to bring existing games into the Board universe.
Board is combining the old-school nostalgia of game night with all the advantages of digital gaming—and it might just be a hit for everyone in the family.
“I think for a lot of parents, myself included, you don’t want to pretend like technology doesn’t exist, because technology makes things better—Board does the rule maintenance for you, it does the score keeping, it does all these things,” Putnam says. “But you don’t want technology to remove social interaction. It’s important that the screen brings people together. It doesn’t replace your friends or your family, it doesn’t replace your teacher, but it helps make those experiences more rich.”