About the future of digital tabletop gaming

Hi there! I’m Mauricio García, director of the indie games studio The Game Kitchen… Welcome to the first article of the All On Board! blog!

 

Let me tell you all  about a topic that I’ve always been highly enthusiastic about. Board games as well as videogames have been two of my major passions for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t easy, but eventually I managed to work professionally in videogame development, without ever forgetting board games, a hobby that has always led me to accept a game whenever there’s been a chance. 

 

Sometimes, those games took place on a screen. I still hold dear the countless games of Carcassone on Xbox 360 we played at Carlos Viola’s place (the famous composer of Blasphemous’ soundtrack). And not so long ago, during the harsh lockdown, all those hours playing board games online with my friends kept my sanity in check. I suppose the same thing happened to many of you. That’s why, in the last few years, I haven’t stopped diving deep into the segment where board games and videogames merge: The digital board game. 

 

Blessed board games clubs!

Two years ago I moved to another city due to work matters. As I didn’t have any friends here yet, my options for playing board games in person faded away. Right then, the bulb light went off: What if a board game could be a way of forming new friendships around a shared interest? I did some digging and I got lucky! Not so far from my new residence, I found a terrific board games club. Since I joined, I’ve got plenty of excuses to find games to take part in, and players when I feel like playing something specific. 

 

I can only recommend you to join a “Board Games Club” if you are fortunate enough to have one near you. And if you don’t, maybe you could start your own!

 

A hybrid hobby combining the physical and the digital

Although, thanks to the Club I have plenty of opportunities to play, I miss playing with my longtime friends. We still have an active Discord group that we created during COVID-19 pandemic, and from time to time we turn to online playing for a match of some of our favourite titles. 

In the last few years, I have been noticing how more and more games, especially the most popular ones, are offering their own digital versions. We also have at our disposal online board games platforms, where the selection of titles keeps expanding even further.

 

However, even though this way of playing is perfectly functional, the digital experience doesn’t quite satisfy me, since the only thing I have to interact socially with my friends is a Discord voice call. 

These experiences made me wonder if it could be possible to seek something better: A new form of digital board game that allows people to better enjoy its social dimension. Then, I had the chance to give a videogame called Demeo a try in a gadget named Meta Quest 2, and so it hit me… XR devices could be the ingredient that digital board games lacked!

 

The XR device as a new computing platform

About a year ago, Meta presented a prototype of an experimental device called Orion. It consisted of a pair of ordinary glasses (quite thick, but nothing too crazy) that, when you put them on, allow you to see virtual objects anchored to the real ones and interact with them using your hands. Although they made very clear that these glasses would not go on sale (the price was expected to be so elevated that it wouldn’t make sense as a product) its effect was a tsunami: Now, we all have very clear which way to go. In just a few years, technology will have advanced to a point where this kind of device would be as affordable as a smartphone is nowadays. 

 

The demo made in the Meta conference did not leave anyone indifferent. In my case, I couldn’t help but get excited thinking: “what a great virtual play of Cthulhu: Death May Die! I could have with that!”

 

Throughout this year, I’ve been closely following the different XR/VR strategies (and the rumor mill) of the major tech giants:

• With the Vision Pro, Apple managed to score two major wins: Users accepting having the headset connected to a battery pack to reduce weight and a new category of product distanced from gaming, focused on professional use and media consumption. At the moment, rumors suggest that they are working on a more affordable version and on their own intelligent glasses.
• Meta cancels or at least pushes Meta Quest 4 to 2027 (distancing themselves from gaming) in favour of a segment closer to the one of Vision Pro. 
• Samsung just launched Galaxy XR in some countries, offering equivalent functionality to Vision Pro at half the price, and more gaming friendly thanks to their optional controllers.
• Rumors appear indicating that Steam is preparing to capture the segment of VR gaming with their own standalone device. 
• The most recent information: Meta Rayban Display hits the market, a pair of intelligent glasses that are super light (still far from XR functionality), being the first ones in creating a screen integrated in a glass that is commercially viable. 

It’s hard to foresee who will be the winner in this technological Game of Thrones, but one thing is clear for me: It won’t be long before XR devices are all over! And we will be able to use them for playing board games with our friends remotely! The digital board game is about to become something much more immersive and socially satisfactory!

This time… It’s personal

In February 2025, we launched our first public version of All on Board! in Steam VR and Meta Quest Store. After three years of development and immeasurable quantity of effort by my wonderful team, finally there was enough finished and polished content to start getting it into players’ hands.

The decision of postponing many of the functions and games to bring them later on through frequent updates wasn’t easy to make, or to communicate it to our Kickstarter’s backers, but I still think that it was the best for the project. This allowed us to focus on polishing the most important element: usability as comfortable and intuitive that the tool can disappear so you can concentrate on the game, and a select catalogue of carefully adapted board games- a handful of classics  (french deck, chess, ludo, etc.) and seven licensed games, including Terraforming Mars, Aye Dark Overlord! or Istanbul, to name a few. 

It was incredibly satisfying for all of us to confirm the principal hypothesis of the project: It’s possible to meet with friends to play a round of a board game, thanks to virtual reality you feel like you are “sharing the same table” no matter how far you are from each other. 

 

If you have a Meta Quest 2 (or superior) you’re in luck: Starting with 1.2, you can try All on Board! for free through the demo version (we’re working on having an available demo for Steam VR too). We invite you to try it, and, above all, share your opinion with us in order to keep working on improving the platform. 

 

The goal remains the same

Due to being 100% independent, we are in a unique position to reach our goal. While tech manufacturers are fighting to make devices more affordable and light, we will keep adding features and more titles to our platform, increasing the value that it offers to the still small niche of “enthusiastics of board games that use a VR device”. 

These new features and contents planned for the next few months are grouped into several areas: 

• To expand the catalogue of licensed games with attractive titles.
• To keep refining the internal creation tools, in order to put them in players’ hands as soon as possible (modding).
• To be prepared to bring All on Board! to more players by launching it on future devices. 

We have a public roadmap focused on what we are going to implement in the next year- as a highly innovative project, unforeseen problems are to be expected, that’s why we don’t implement new things to the roadmap until we can be sure about them-, and we keep updating and discussing it with players in our Discord server (Be sure to join, we are unveiling new roadmap on Nov. 5th on Discord!).

 

We also just premiered the latest episode of our Development Diary, where we discuss modding (the most demanded characteristic by our users) and how we are doing to bring it as soon as possible.

 

 

To conclude, a commitment 

Even though the road ahead is long and the challenges are considerable, the truth is that we are thrilled with what we have achieved until now. We feel fortunate to have both critical and public success with our indie games (especially Blasphemous, Blasphemous II and more recently Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound). This gives us the financial safety to keep investing on the project for a good while, and keep taking small steps to turn All on Board! into the best digital board games platform. 

What’s more, we have the freedom to do it with a fair pricing policy for consumers, as the ones of our licensed games: each title is a DLC, but only one person of the group needs to make the purchase (like in real life, with one copy of the board game the whole group can play).

We have a full commitment with this vision of the digital board game: we will work on adding the missing ingredients and bringing a bunch of attractive games and, update per update, we’ll keep putting our progress in the hands of our users at the best pace we can. 

We won’t spare any efforts to make All on Board! the tool that the board games fans deserve: the best existing experience of digital board games and a community of players that will make the first board games club that’s actually global.