ePawn Arena: Do Gamers Need It?

Gamers love gadgets. Gamers love games. It should be no surprise that gamers want to combine these loves, and a new product just launched on Kickstarter to do that. But is the ePawn Arena for real, or is it just another tabletop white elephant?

There’s no question the ePawn Arena represents some clever technology. ePawn has created a surface that tracks up to 32 objects on it, small robots that can move on the surface, and software to connect the robots and mobile device controllers.

There’s a lot you can do with these building blocks. The ePawn Arena Kickstarter video shows off applications for racing cars, battling robots, and a Wings of Glory game where the planes move themselves. But there are also some significant limitations.

The printed boards look great, and it’s easy to imagine a dungeon crawling adventure using the ePawn Arena. However, the prospect becomes less appealing when you realize that each dungeon room will require its own printed board, or at least a large set of geomorphic pieces. Building up a collection of monsters sounds like an expensive proposition, and how many batteries will your little robots need to keep the game going?

Chess with self-moving pieces is kind of cute, but how does the knight leap over the pawns? What happens to a piece that’s been captured? Does it remove itself from the board? Is this supposedly universal game board only useful for games where pieces don’t jump or stack?

These are solvable problems, of course. It might be cute seeing pawns roll out of the way so the knight can move to its position. Dungeon crawl monsters could be simple toppers on a generic platform, and the robots might be so efficient that their batteries last for years. But the potential problems underscore a larger issue: games are systems, and the ePawn Arena is just one of many components that must work together seamlessly if players are going to have fun.

Do YOU Need an ePawn Arena?

The ePawn Arena may have an even bigger problem, though: it’s an accessory that’s trying to become an essential part of the gaming experience. It’s fun to think about pieces rolling around on a table and face-to-face gaming experience that captures the immediacy of video games, but good design solutions are built around meeting needs.

Silly as it sounds, board gamers have needs too. They need a variety of experiences, whether from a single game or many games. They need convenient storage of game pieces. They need rules that are sensible and easy to learn.

The ePawn Arena doesn’t fully address any of those needs. It provides a variety of play experiences, but only if you obtain other components. Any components you buy will require their own storage. Self-moving robots and apps may make following the rules easier, but moving pieces is usually the easiest part of a game.

That’s not to say that the ePawn Arena can’t make a game experience more fun. There may even be a place for it in game clubs like the San Marcos Board Gamers. But there’s no gap in the player experience for it to fill. That suggests it will ultimately be remembered as an interesting novelty — like Golem Arcana, or the original Microsoft Surface — than the future of gaming.