A Queen's University researcher says paper-like display technologies will revolutionize board games.A Queen's University researcher says paper-like display technologies will revolutionize board games. (Queen's University)

A group of Queen's University researchers in Kingston, Ont., have reworked the popular board game Settlers of Catan so that projected images of characters actually move about on the board.

"This is no doubt the future of board games," said Roel Vertegaal, who presented a research paper Monday on electronic board games at a conference hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

Settlers of Catan reimagined

Roel Vertegaal offers this description of the electronic version of Settlers of Catan:

"John, Jack and Peter are playing the electronic version of Settlers of Catan. As soon as their hexagonal board pieces are placed onto the table the game lights up, with every tile automatically sorted. A randomly selected tile lights up to begin play. The players with property on that tile receive resources from that tile, which they can use for construction. The tile shows an animation of a lumberjack cutting a tree.

John, who’s next, picks up his tile and pours the wood where he wants to construct a village. Animations show buildings being constructed, and the village is populated by animated game characters. Next, Jack commands the citizens of his village to conquer the newly built village through a marking menu.

Characters run out of their houses as Jack pours iron ore from a resource card onto his village. An animation shows the villagers smithing swords from the ore, and the arming of a band of men. He picks up the tile, and pours the band onto the village of Peter, which is easily overrun."

"This is about humanizing technology, getting people away from the screen," Vertegaal, an associate professor at the Queen's Human Media Lab, said in an interview. Gaming has become too successful in the last five years, with some terrible effects, he said.

"We're seeing kids sit inside with a screen. We're seeing adults walking under buses because they're looking at their technology."

The conference, sponsored by the card maker Hallmark, is entitled Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction and brings together researchers working on integrating interactive technology into traditionally low-tech objects such as board games and greeting cards.

Settlers of Catan is a board game where players compete to "settle" on the island of Catan by collecting and trading resources.

The electronic version uses a computer, an infrared camera, an overhead projector and thin hexagonal tiles of cardboard embedded with infrared markers. The tiles are pieced together as the game advances. Images are projected on the tiles but the players determine what images are projected and how the characters interact.

When someone moves or turns the cardboard tile, the image moves and turns. Connect one hexagonal piece to another and characters walk from one piece to another. Tilt a tile towards another to "spill" an army for war.

In his paper, Vertegaal wrote that people who tried out the electronic board game felt "they suspended belief that this was an electronic game."

Vertegaal envisions new display technologies such as flexible, organic light emitting diods that would enable video screens the thickness of a hair to be fixed to the cardboard tiles. The screens would project a game's animation instead of the overhead projector.

Each tile would be like a mini-computer, capable of interacting with the adjoining tile, depending on what the player wanted to do.

Vertegaal said his version of Settlers of Catan is a futuristic take on the traditional game but he expects people will begin to see electronic board games come to the market in five to 10 years.

"The importance is to have families sit around the board game again," he said. "Playing Risk on the computer is not a great experience. Having tunnel vision because you're glued to a screen is not great, and that's what we're trying to break here."