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This is the world’s most advanced Scrabble set. Packed with LEDs, RFID sensors and fancy software, it’s the cutting-edge in boardgames — and it’s worth a cool £19,000.
Designed especially for the Prague Mind Sports Festival — where clever types gather to compete in a range of mentally taxing games — this board is designed to help broadcast games online, in real-time.
RFID sensors beneath each square — there are 225 in total — detect the presence of tiles which have corresponding RFID tags embedded in them. Software then scans the board every 974 milliseconds to update a live internet feed of the game, as it happens. The whole thing is clad in carbon fibre, and uses LEDs to dramatically light the playing surface, too.
The tournament kicks off on December 1st, if you’re keen to see the board used in anger. [PR Newswire via Engadget]
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I thinking here is a site that isn’t going to strain from taking too many orders.
4 see what you did there :p
Awful picture, only one word out of the three is valid.
“Designed especially for the Prague Mind Sports Festival”
bad troll art bad.
Still, two of those words shouldn’t even be on a professional scrabble board.
i just got “lozenges” as an opening word this morning…got me 122 points right there ….mawahahahahah
Extravagant and pointless. here is a better idea:
A touch enabled monitor, half a dozen cheap chinese android tablets and an android hdmi dongle. Bed the monitor in a table top, plug in the dongle. Connect to internet and run any networked board game on both the tablets and dongle. A far cheaper option for visual with sound and animation and a whole compendium of potential titles to play…
No. Just no.
You can’t just say no without saying why not…
It’s a Scrabble board for playing Competitive Scrabble. Moving to a digital only version of the game played via tablets would get rid of any atmosphere, but could also be subject to tampering.
At least when you’re drawing tiles out of the bag you know they’re going to be random.
Motorsports are expensive too, they could replace all those millions of pounds worth of cars and stuff with a simulation. Easier to broadcast and safer.
I’m sure software can easily manage a random generator. Plenty of online gambling/gaming sites already. Scrabble is a board game, played around a table, it’s hardly motorsports and doesn’t warrant a 19K price tag if the sole purpose is to broadcast games online in real time… just saying
Nobody trusts software, especially not if it’s claiming to be random. Anyone who owns an MP3 player can attest to that.
And hey, it’s their money and their gaming tournament. I’m sure they’ll be using it for many years to come.
Poking at a screen is never going to replicate the feel of the game.