Some time later....

 So our clever electronic game idea sat in a drawer for many months (years?) but it was always there, bubbling away as "unrealised potential".

As time passed, the cost of manufacturing (particularly in China) steadily increased to the point of making such a game idea commercially unviable; at one point we worked out that each board section would need to retail at about £40 just to break even on production costs (allowing for distributor and retail costs).

Even as board games regularly hit £80-£100 on Kickstarter (I know, a bargain by today's prices!) asking someone to drop a few hundred quid on an untried gaming platform - with an uncertain development future (I was still working full time as well) - was just too much.

But the idea of a gaming system, on which people could play games either against each other (across the internet) or a computer AI opponent just wouldn't go away.
If the first idea was too specific - would it be possible to focus more on a generic gaming system ?



Instead of small, individual inputs connected to a microcontroller, I played with the idea of a multiplexed array of hall sensors, which could be used to create a "tabletop" onto which players could project any game they liked.
(above shows early development of a Blood Bowl type game being played on six "panels" each with a grid of 8 x 6 squares and a hall sensor in the centre of each square).

Using multi-plexing required a higher output current than my preferred PIC microcontrollers could handle, so I changed over to AVR and had some PCBs manufactured as a proof of concept. Coming in at around £8 per board, manufactured and fully assembled, there appeared to be an opportunity to do something with this after all!


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