During the past months, we talked about Dized interactive tutorials at length. It may be the most recognizable and innovative feature we’re working on, and we’re pretty excited to be building a tool that will allow many people to learn new games faster, and finally try out titles that have been sitting on the shelf for way too long.
As you probably know, we think board games can benefit from a lot of other digital features. Publishers know it and have been trying several things over the years (here’s an overview). Some offer digital soundtracks — like 7th Continent — others create additional scenarios to download — like Monolith does for Conan — but only a few manage to develop actual companion apps for their games, such as Fantasy Flight and Renegade Games.
It doesn’t come as a surprise, as building a digital app is time consuming, expensive and requires a whole different set of skills than those needed to publish board games. You need to take into account updates, how to reach the players who bought the game, and ultimately it might not generate enough profit make financial sense. Publishers, we all know, are already busy trying to meet their printer’s deadlines and keeping up with the increasing competition.
Here’s the good news: we intend to make Dized an open platform for everything digital related to board games. Any publisher or independent designer will be able to create and upload game content, without any concern about promotion or customer support; and players will always know where to look to digitally enhance their game nights. As we discussed last week, the Rule Lookup Tool (RLT) is our second “big feature” for Dized, and while we’re fully focused on delivering those first, here’s how Dized could be in a couple of years.
Wouldn’t it be cool if…?
Meet Anna, John, Tom, and Lucy. They’re good friends, and they’ve been regularly playing board games together for two years now. Tonight, they decide to get Scythe off the shelf — they all love the game but haven’t played it in a while, so they’re a little rusty when it comes to the details. Not a problem, they always have a tablet with Dized on the table.
While Tom and Lucy open the enormous game box, Anna fires up the app, quickly finds Scythe in the list of her favorite games, and launches the Setup Guide. In no time, the Encounter tokens are placed on the right territories, the Combat and Objective piles shuffled. The group leaves the Encounter cards in the box, as they will use the interactive version featured in the app instead. The Factory deck is placed, and the app randomly distributes the factions to the players — Tom gets Crimea, which gives him an excellent opportunity to unlock an achievement on its Dized profile as he has yet to win a game with this faction. Within minutes, everyone has drawn their Objective and Combat cards and placed all the tokens and coins on their Player and Faction mats. In a tap, Anna switches to the Rules Recap Tool, and everything comes back pretty fast to all of them when they see the rules summed up in a few slides: top-row and bottom-row actions, productions for each terrain type, Combat, etc.
Justa a few minutes after opening the box and they can focus on the game, letting the soundtrack immerse them into Scythe’s Eastern European uchronia.
Unsurprisingly, during the next couple of hours they bump into a few rules they’re not sure about, but each time the right answer is found in seconds with the Rule Lookup Tool.
Can I move a mech/character with Seaworthy or Submerge onto or off of a lake if they don’t have Riverwalk?
How does the Mill work?
Both questions are not a problem when the solution doesn’t even require for you to skim the rulebook.
After a suspenseful game, and a couple of obligatory betrayals, each of them uses Dized on their smartphones to calculate the score: the app asks them all the needed info — coins in hand, star tokens placed, territory and resources controlled, structures bonuses, etc.
The apps synchronize with the tablet, and everyone finds out who won after a drum roll! Looking at their stats, the group also realizes that it’s the 9th time they play the game together, and Lucy just beat the highest score — which she immediately shares with all her friends on Dized! Tom didn’t win with Crimea, but unlocked an achievement by placing all six stars; his progression for Scythe now shows 54%, which makes him want to play again and try new approaches. Maybe he’ll use the Dized AI to train in a couple of solo games later in the week…
A few days later, the small group starts planning their next meeting, all through the Dized Game Night Organizer. They quickly find the next date when everyone’s available, and John creates a little poll to decide what to play. They’ve just received a notification from CMON informing them that the new Eric Lang’s game has hit the stores, and as it’s been on their Wishlist for a while, that’s the obvious choice. In a tap, Anna informs her favorite FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store) that she’ll come by to pick up a copy. They’re all quite excited, but Tom suggests they may need a fifth player since someone from the local Dized Guild mentioned it was best enjoyed with five players. Over the next couple of days, the group looks for players with similar tastes (and availability) using the Local Player Finder, and eventually they invite Matt to join on Friday. Matt gets all the info and direction for Game Night directly through his Dized calendar.
Friday, 7:00 p.m, everyone’s there. After introducing Matt, the group just grabs some snacks, launches the tutorial and starts learning the new CMON title as they go.
During the game, smartphones running Dized can be used to scan the cards and get all related rules superimposed. The Rule Lookup Tool helps them understand how to use a particular tile, but at the end of the game, they decide to send feedback to the publisher, directly through Dized, on how to improve that explanation.
They all love the game, so they agree to try out the campaign mode next — Matt will join them again, so they’ll add him to their Dized friends list, and from there to the gaming group.
Work in progress
What you just read is not what Dized will be at launch — so many things, so little time — but how we see the platform growing over the next few years. We think it sounds exciting, new… and game-changing?
Feel free to share your thoughts with us.
PS: this will be the last blog post for 2017. We’ll get back at it starting on the second week of January. Meanwhile — happy holidays and play a lot of board games while at it!
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