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Comment by cwkoss | Hacker News Reader

Very cool!

In terms of making a game with them, I think a design where the pins are on the face of the card may be useful. I want to be able to 'draw' a card without knowing what is on it.

Certainly can be useful with pins on the back (and I totally get how this orientation is probably more size-efficient), but I think front pins would be more 'playable'. Maybe a design could be achieved with holes that pass through all the way so it can be written with either orientation?

Being able to 'power up' an existing card in the upwards orientation could be really cool for situations where you kind of want 'counters' applied to a portable card. Could have a base-station that allows you to 'add' the qualities of one card to another target card, or 'evolve' a pokemon, etc.

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> In terms of making a game with them, I think a design where the pins are on the face of the card may be useful. I want to be able to 'draw' a card without knowing what is on it.

That would work. But you can also make that work with current hardware (I think): you just need a delay between pressing the button and the screen changing? So that the player can press the button, pick up the card, and five seconds later, it's revealed.

Oh hey, that'd totally work. I wouldn't even need a timer, I could detect when a card is placed back onto that spot.

So in a way, you could "leave" traps or powerups on spots on the base, and your character activates them when it lands there.

(obligatory: 'you've activated my trap card')

Great idea! You could still combine the timer with the trap. (Eg make the trap only activate until some amount of time has passed. So your opponent never knows whether it's safe, even if she's already been on the spot.)

Ah yeah, originally I wanted the contacts to wrap around the edges of the card, so then you can stack them and address whichever one in the stack you want.

Maybe I should raise the priority on that.

Definitely I'm into the idea of evolving, or breeding cards like pokemon. Powerup or 'combine' would be cool too.

Did you ever see a game called Drop Mix? It didn’t have displays in the cards but did sense their position on a mat and react accordingly, and I think that might be a better interaction model. It would require that everything is really low power so you only need to supply power when changing the display.

Ooh thanks, I'll check it out!

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