Scrabble for the iPad: the best $1,000 you ever spent on a board game | Hacker News Reader

Scrabble for the iPad: the best $1,000 you ever spent on a board game

engadget.com

61 pointsrooshdi33 comments

"You can't deny, it's pretty metaphysically silly to be playing a board game your parents bought at a yard sale for $2 on a $500+ iPad, in conjunction with two or more $200+ iPhones. Mix in service plans, accessories, the price of the app ($10), and the bribes you'll have to pay your friends to join in on something so embarrassing, and you're really pushing the limits of common sense with Scrabble for the iPad. "

The title of this is really just linkbait, its misleading. Scrabble is some marginal cost over the price of the device, not the reason why someone buys it.

Or it's just, you know, a joke.

There are a lot of board games I like, but don't play very much due to the set up time. A version of Puerto Rico for these would be awesome.

Agreed. Puerto Rico, Agricola, any game where you have your own board or 'plot' would be very cool. Anyone who's had to stop for a day or two and try to protect a game in progress would appreciate an autosave feature too.

Just make a high-resolution photo, works well.

Board games for the iPad is about the only app category I would be interested in diving in to.

I am torn between asking for licenses and trying to come up with new game concepts that feature elements only possible with the iPad.

One of my friends would invite me and others to play various board games, particularly Carcassonne. It was fun to play, but very slow, both setting up and moving along during gameplay.

I grabbed the Xbox Live version of it a little while ago and, wow. So much easier and more fun to play. You just jump right in and start going. You can usually get through a 2 player game in about 20 minutes. Scoring is automatic and quick (manually it can typically take 5-10 minutes to score a game once it's over, depending on how many players). So I'm totally sold on tablet-style board games.

Now if only someone ports Battle Chess over to iPad...

One nice potential for this is that people far away could join in over the internet.

Either one person with an iPhone playing remotely, or another couple of people with iPads/iPhones replicating the board and playing the same game.

I wonder if they've done anything like that.

And the board state could exist on a server somewhere and you could join and leave at any time and play a long running game, and then you open up the opportunity for the iPad to be a Google Maps stlye viewport into a single massively multiplayer game of the Red Alert / Populous / Sim City / Gods styles and the key bit being it's a small living room coffee table device with long battery life and App Store enabled low complexity of joining in.

Cross with Dropbox/Flickr and instead of video conferencing you get a virtual object/image store between you and your (parents/family/friends/whoever). Not in an 'email a picture' kind of way, but in a nearest-thing-to-teleportation way.

Open app on iPad, on iPhone, take picture with phone. Other end of the tunnel opens their app and there's a new picture. All you need then is that 'rebuild a few photos into a 3D model' technique that was going around a while ago and you have a great tech demo. Wonder if it would have any real world desirability... ahh, sometimes I wish I was a real programmer.

> I wonder if they've done anything like that.

You just described Words with friends for the iPhone. You can also play up to 20 games simultaneously. But the problem with playing scrabble online is that it's way too easy to cheat. (www.scrabulizer.com for example). At least in person you can watch them.

Well, shit. I guess thanks to the iPad we aren't deprived of literally 100s and 100s of online scrabble games.

http://www.google.com/search?q=online+scrabble

isc.ro by far the best

I would not be so quick to write the iPad off just because alternatives are free and the iPad is expensive. Humans are weird creatures. Who knows how people justify their purchases. But I can tell you from spending an hour in an Apple Store on Saturday -- the iPad is flying off the shelf, and the buyers are all types. Perhaps a $1,000 game of Scrabble is not as unreasonable as you might think.

If you buy an iPad just to play Scabble, it's $1,000 for the game. But a common family may already have an iPhone for each member. They could decide to buy an iPad to replace a netbook, or because they have none and/or no computer.

When they will find Scrabble and decide to buy it, it will be $10 for the game, not $1,000.

Those online versions require an entirely different computing experience: sitting in front of a computer with a monitor, most likely isolated.

The iPad/iPhone combo creates a potentially more social, electronic hybrid of the table-top experience. That's partly why this is more compelling than all those others.

>There isn't even a helpful warning like "are you sure you want to end this game you just invested an hour of your life into without even saving or something?"

Well, yeah. That's not possible. When you hit the menu button, the app gets killed. (I think it gets some sub-1-second time to try to wrap up loose ends, but still.)

Now, it should save your state as you go, but that behavior isn't possible with the iPad SDK, and engadget should know that.

not so! i have my own game that also runs across two or more iphones and/or ipads via wifi, and it saves its state just fine, and allows you to pick up where you left off.

true, you don't have a whole lot of time to save state, but you don't need much. in my case, everything i need to know about the game is saved in a roughly 4k blob, which is saved to prefs almost instantly.

What I meant is that the message asking if you're sure you want to quit isn't possible. But yes, it definitely should save state automatically.

I believe he was referring to the Scrabble menu button in-app, not the physical home button common to the iPad/iPhone/Touch devices.

Scrabble should be part of the elementary school curriculum. There are so many opportunities not just with the iPad but with tablets in general.

I know it's easy, and even sensible to dimiss this as completely overpriced, but it's concepts like these that really get me excited. I see so much potential in this sort of device communication, it makes me anxious just thinking about it.

iPad as digital gameboard... that could be pretty compelling.

I'd love to have a really nice high-resolution digital chessboard.

How would this be better than an infinite resolution analog one?

Or an 8x8 pixel one?

An 8x8 pixel chessboard would require players to memorize which color corresponds to which piece type (for both sides).

You could also have certain flickering colors represent certain pieces, but overall it would require good color vision from all players.

Alternatively, you could have an 8x8 character grid; monochrome if you represent things like:

    rnbqkbnr
    pppppppp
    . . . . 
     . . . .
    . . . . 
     . . . .
    PPPPPPPP
    RNBQKBNR

    ♜♞♝♛♚♝♞♜
    ♟♟♟♟♟♟♟♟
    ＿█＿█＿█＿█
    █＿█＿█＿█＿
    ＿█＿█＿█＿█
    █＿█＿█＿█＿
    ♙♙♙♙♙♙♙♙
    ♖♘♗♕♔♗♘♖

(The second board may not be properly fixed-width in your local "fixed-width" font, but you get the picture).

Playing in the car/train/bus/plane, never losing pieces, computer/remote opponents, huge database of historic games, ...

Oh, I don't know, I was riveted by the video of the two guys playing scrabble...

Check out http://gametableapp.com

It does not have logic to verify moves (which is pretty clever) so it is just a beautiful gameboard.

"You can't deny, it's pretty metaphysically silly to be playing a board game your parents bought at a yard sale for $2 on a $500+ iPad, in conjunction with two or more $200+ iPhones."

Yes, if that's all that the iPad+iPhones were capable of...

If that's all you bought them for. Extra capabilities don't count as value if you aren't benefiting from them.

Playing Scrabble with out the direct face-to-face communication sounds terrible. What about argueing over words, bluffing, celebrating, whining. Does not sound even remotely fun compared to real Scrabble to me.

Huh? Isn't the use-case here that you all sit around the iPad, which acts as the common game board, using your personal iPhone to hold your bricks? I didn't watch the video, but that's how I understood it.

I don't have Flash so I could not watch the video. If you are right, then it makes it even worse to me. I like the haptic feel of the pieces when playing. Why would you want to remove that. I see no benefit at all making this virtual. ("difficult math", seriously?) D&D on a pad could rock of course.

This fits comfortably in the slot between insanely dumb and amazingly cool.

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