Teburu could be the digital board game system that finally catches on

After nearly two decades covering Gen Con, the world’s largest tabletop gaming convention, I’ve gotten pretty sick and tired of hearing about digitized board game tables and consoles.

Touch-sensitive screens, motion sensing cameras, RFID-enabled bits, AAA-licensed titles, virtual reality solutions… I’ve heard literally every pitch that’s been made in the last few years. The trouble is that nearly everyone hocking a digital board game console is selling an overpriced solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. Thank you for all the great digital board games that are out right now. Most of them can be shipped to my home within 24 hours, and don’t need a firmware upgrade.

What if there were a digital solution to enhance the user experience? A digital platform that is almost transparent that allows for immersion and speeds up play. The Xplored team introduced me to Teburu earlier this month. Although I was initially skeptical, I believe this startup could be a great fit for the niche.

The center of Teburu is a rectangle game board that’s about the same dimensions as the average one. Monopoly board; it’s just that this one is covered on one side with a thin, pre-printed adhesive sheet full of sensors. On top, you can place a compatible board game. The bottoms of all your pieces have RFID tags that can be detected by the game board as they pass across it. Attached to the game board is a dongle with two antennas — one that connects to the RFID chips and another for Bluetooth. That’s for the dice, two simple six-sided dice just smart enough to know which side is up, and for other Bluetooth-capable devices like speakers, tablets, and smartphones. The most complicated item is a singular, fancier plinth for larger miniatures — call them boss miniatures — that lights up with a multicolored LED light at four points along its edge. That’s it: Four mildly intelligent, by today’s standards, peripheral devices all connected to the smartphones everyone keeps in their pockets all day anyway.

This digital kit allows you to do what the other kits don’t. It allows you to know exactly where your players are located on the board. Developers can program environments, as well as behaviors, into their enemies. In my demo of Bad Karmas, Curse of the ZodiacThis meant each player character had their own sound when they walked. My character’s footsteps were heard as they walked over the pit of lava. My smartphone allowed me to choose a skill from the small deck of cards that was displayed on my screen. When I picked up the dice and rolled it, I received a six. This made an unusual sound and allowed me to hit the boss. That boss’s plinth lit up, indicating that I had dropped its shields on its rear left side. Play was then passed to my left player, who began their turn with an unusual musical flourish.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

An assortment of player characters and zodiac-sign monsters.

The Teburu system supported me at all times during the demo. The Teburu system was instantly able to display hyperlinked keywords, displaying small menus that reminded me about their effects in the game. The focus of the interface traveled intelligently around the room, drawing the entire party’s focus to the main screen — a tablet — where global information about the encounter was being displayed, and alternately to my own individual screen that served as my personal sideboard. It’s easy to see how Teburu could enable solo gameplay, an extremely popular option in board games since the beginning of the pandemic.

Teburu wasn’t a burdensome thing or the sole focus of all interactions in the game. Instead, he was just there to help me, complementing the experience and not distracting from it. It was fantastic.

“[The hardest part was] the user experience, or the game flow,” said Riccardo Landi, Teburu’s head of design. “You have the game board, you have the physical dice, you have three or four — five! — screens to look at. [It’s about]You will learn what the game is telling you to do. It’s about the timing and the rhythm of the game, because if things happen too fast you lose control. If they happen too fast, you’re not going to want to play.”

Teburu is a great option for someone who’s spent thousands, perhaps hundreds of, on intricate plastic terrain and trays as well as paint and other accessories to help my tabletop gaming favorites. If I wanted to improve my games, it would be easy for me to spend the $100 required.

However, the catalog of just one game — which hasn’t even shipped to backers yet — is pretty limited. According to the team, most of the hardware work has been completed. Davide Garofalo is the founder and CEO of the company. He says that development began five years ago. This led to nine patents. To make sure the company had enough hardware to meet the potential demand, Garofalo says he has stockpiled the necessary components needed to make more — mostly the hard-to-find specialty chips and antennae needed for connectivity. They’re just waiting, ready for the next wave.

There are still great games to be had, but at least two have already been confirmed. Paradox Interactive’s new partnership is the crown jewel. Soon Teburu will begin creating original games based on the European publisher’s World of Darkness properties. Beginning with Vampire: A MasqueradeTheir hope is for the line to expand to include both The Apocalypse of the WerewolfAnd Hunter: The Reckoning. Teburu’s team wants to connect the three games in a way that allows the stories of each game to flow naturally into the next.

“It will be a game of city management,” founder and CEO Garofalo said, “where you are Anarchs willing to rule Milan over the Camarilla. We’ll then add a Werewolf, Hunter, and Wolf title to the mix, which will all be linked in cross-chronicles. [way].”

You should not be limited to turn-based tactical adventures. Bad KarmasThe World of Darkness game will have a narrative focus. A cooperative role-playing campaign within a box is something like GloomhavenBut with a computer playing the role as the Dungeon Masters.

“Imagine something like Arkham Horror 2 Edition, where you go into a place and you take a card,” Garofalo said, name-dropping one of the leading app-assisted board games on the market right now. “Instead of taking a card, we have a whole narrative design — like in a video game — that is based on who you are, what is the moment, what’s happening in that moment in the timeline, and so on. You can choose among many possible options, so the system will suggest you the most appropriate narrative event. These can be either narrative or investigative or relate to other characters. [in the game with you at that point in time]. So it’s not a role-playing game; it’s a board game experience — but very narrative.”

With the marketing and cutting-edge research energy being consumed by the metaverse, virtual reality and augmented reality these days it seems a good idea to go all out with an augmented reality and virtual reality system. Garofalo believes that’s yet another solution in search of a problem. Humans, despite being physical, still enjoy socializing around the table.

“I believe that we are still monkeys around the monolith,” Garofalo said with a hopeful grin, “or a tribe around the campfire.”

You can expect to see more crowdfunding campaigns coming from Teburu over the next few months and even years. Bad Karmas, Curse of the ZodiacIt comes as part of the base Teburu systems and can be purchased via Gamefound as an equivalent to $178.