I'll do one better. Here's a genre of games that I wish existed: smart board games (SBG's). I define an SBG as a game that (1) relies on all players having a mo

I'll do one better. Here's a genre of games that I wish existed: smart board games (SBG's). I define an SBG as a game that (1) relies on all players having a mobile phone to implement game mechanics that would be impractical to approximate solely with analog objects like the traditional tools of board games (e.g., pen, paper, cards, dice, tokens, meeple, boards, etc.); and (2) relies on direct player-to-player interaction that would be impractical unless played face-to-face or via high-fidelity virtual reality. No board game has yet exploited the fact that everyone has a smart phone in their pocket. There are social mobile games and mobile clones of board games, but their are no games that exploit the power of the ubiquitous mobile phone to create an otherwise impossible in-person board game. The closest game designers have come to this is games like Pokemon Go, but Pokemon Go is not a SBG because it does not rely on player-to-player interaction that requires high-fidelity virtual reality or face-to-face play. Here are some capabilities SBG's will give game designers: - Implement complex probabilistic behavior, cause and effect relationships, and scoring - Accelerate game play by automating score keeping and timekeeping - Parallelize game play by allowing simultaneous turn-taking - Reveal certain information to certain players with high granularity - Allow players to communicate or transact with other players without revealing which player they are interacting with - Persist detailed game state between game sessions - Procedural world and character generation I believe that SBG's will inevitably develop into a rich, hugely varied genre of board games that largely displaces traditional board games, but to my knowledge there isn't a single example commercially available at this time. The core challenge of designing a compelling SBG will be to exploit the capabilities of the smart phone while simultaneously keeping players focused on the face-to-face interactions that give board games their timeless appeal.