There are a lot of "electronic price tags" which are basically the same form factor as your trading cards, except they mass produce them (have nice plastic cases) and they usually include a 3-color eink (black-white-red or black-white-yellow) plus a wireless transmitter (usually proprietary protocol, but sometimes plain Bluetooth and/or NFC) for OTA updates and a 10-year battery (sometimes replaceable CR2032). Also, if you can grab them at $6 / piece, I imagine they're being produced for a lot less than that (random AliExpress link: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803094207083.html).

If you're thinking of mass-production might be worth reaching out to one of those manufacturers; you can buy in bulk if nothing else (but I'm sure they'd be open to customizing it a bit - maybe some branding on the plastic molding and whatnot).

Heh, the screens I use are exactly the ones contained in those products.

Huh, the battery lasts for ten years? I wonder how many refreshes you get for that. Maybe I should just be using those.....

I've worked in retail for an electronics store where we gradually changed over to those. They were from https://www.ses-imagotag.com/products/electronic-shelf-label... They even calimed to us 13 years batery life at an average of 1 refresh per day. They are pretty power efficient and we've had many devices that ran for years without an issue.

That's around 5000 refreshes, being a bit charitable. If I'm playing cards, I might see that in a few days, as I'm going to be doing tens or hundreds of refreshes a day, rather than one.

If the cards are always on a table / special playing surface, they could be wirelessly charged during play.

Some variants use NFC power to drive the display update, so no batteries!

I didn't realize NFC could deliver enough power for that. I'll look into it.

The demos I saw of this were slow, on the order of 10 seconds to get enough power through.

If you could store that power in a capacitor it might be fine.

Basically, only one change every ten seconds is probably workable, as long as you don't have a ten second latency when asking for a change.

aha! So there is a catch. Still worth checking out.

I think it would really depends on what game you're playing. From what I gathered from the article it's not really meant to replace a standard deck of cards but more aimed towards board games. People that are serious about board gaming will usually have 1 session/week , sometimes but rarely more, often less. So I'm sure on average each card will get more than 7 refreshes/week but it will probably be in the acceptable range.

Aaron Christophel is your guy for e-ink price tag hacking [1].

He's a friendly guy, he'll help you.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@atc1441

The Waveshare ones are even powered purely by NFC. So they don't need a battery, yet you can rewrite them with ease.

I'm going to have to look into that

Oh wow, that’s so cool

Looks like you need a gateway (not that expensive but too expensive to just hack with those tags at home).

I’d love to find cheap e-ink tags that can just receive a picture over some cheap wireless protocol and display it.

The link was entirely random to show a similar mass produced product, I didn't do much research.

You can search for NFC ones on the same website, they're a few bucks more.

There are also Bluetooth variants which is more friendly to hacking at home (update over the air from farther away) but those look pricier.

Does anybody here know a Bluetooth (ideally) or NFC one? Preferably with a known protocol that has open source software... at least a known/open protocol to set the displays if not end-to-end open. I have wanted to play with one of these but haven't been able to find one that is easy to hack on.

I'd really like a $10-20 epaper display that I could update wirelessly on very low power, there are so many fun projects that could be done with that. There are a few dev boards that almost hit that price point but software support is really bad in my experience.

There's a pretty good set of videos here showing how to hack them: https://youtu.be/S44NSr37eoo

Thanks for this video!

It shows a nice layout with 3D-printed holder, pogo-pins, ESP32 Lolin as programmer, with CC2531 RF dongle as the access point.

Seen these at Ross and/or other discount stores. It boggled my mind. How could these possibly be cheaper than the staff swapping bits of paper. 10 year battery but I assume they break (and you have to walk around to find the broken ones) in 1-2 years, or get retail abuse, or other calamities.

The 4" ones (close to paper tag size) are $20.

I wonder if the cost savings is in eliminating the labor required to physically relabel things. I presume sending one person on patrol to look for the broken tags twice a week is far cheaper.

I can't see how. You need the staff in the store anyway (to check stock level, neaten up things, return merch to the proper location, etc), so they are already interacting at every location. Otherwise they spend a lot of time relatively idle. Are you really going to get that extra bit of time out of them productively?

It's mostly for dynamic pricing (based on time of day, number of customers, weather, you name it). It'd be more expensive and time consuming to send an employee with a label printer all over the store a couple of times a day.

The HFT model is coming to retail? I don't like this.

What happens if I put an item in my cart when the tag says it costs three shillings, but when I get to the register they want five?

Only time I've seen this was an IKEA in Shanghai about 5 years ago. They had a sign that said that umbrellas cost (equivalent to) $1 if it was raining outside and $3 if it wasn't. :)

You wouldn't need a digital, dynamic tag for that?

The only time I've seen dynamic pricing was the KMart blue light special.

This is absolutely awesome! I've had (terrible quality) 3-color e-ink displays and some associated electronics sitting in my office cupboard for a few years because I wanted to prototype this project, but I never did. I'm so glad you did this!

Since I just want this to come to fruition, I'll explain what my intended launch strategy was. I'm a developer (just a contractor, not owner) of Tabletop Simulator and do some stuff in that community where there's an overlap between physical tabletop and digital. My plan was to launch a card game (largely designed) and the e-ink cards simultaneously via Kickstarter. However, before that, a digital implementation of the game on TTS. Basically as much as I love this idea, I couldn't see it being monetisable on its own unless you can bring the cost down significantly. It also didn't seem like a defensible business on its own. But if the product is a game that uses said functionality, well, that'd be just swell.

Anyway, congrats, this is awesome!

Thanks! And thanks for the tip! I may reach out to continue the conversation and shoot ideas back and forth if that's okay :)

Sure. Go for it. Can grab my contact a variety of ways, otherwise. hn@b.dobell.email

The tray interface immediately reminded me of Harmonix's Dropmix.[1] A Dropmix-alike where you can program your own "cards" to store and play, or even just trigger, short loops on a playback device would be incredible.

Adventure card games,[2][3] which blend tabletop RPG and card game mechanics to play through a story and often rely on mutable and custom third-party or player-created cards, are another niche that could rock programmable cards. They don't rely on collectability or random card packs - everything to play comes in a base set, and expansions take the forms of additional classes or adventures. But they can be tedious to set up, card mutability means marking and smudging cards or sleeving them, and using third-party or player-made cards usually requires getting them printed to fit into the deck seamlessly - programmable cards can dodge all of those issues.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZLXSmq9s1A

2: https://www.strangeassembly.com/2019/review-pathfinder-adven...

3: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.obsidian.p...

This is very cool. I think you'll have a hard time finding a traditional board game publisher willing to put money into this (there might be one or two out there, but most will see this as prohibitively expensive for them), but you might be able to pull off a successful Kickstarter for them on your own.

Kind of like the Blinks game system, these little hexes with colored lights in them that each have a separate game in them and can 'teach' the other hexes they connect to.

One of the Blinks Kickstarters: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/move38/blinks-smart-boa...

Card games are generally played with 10-20 cards once you hit your mid/endgames. I can't think of a system where you'd have mechanical benefit of all those being epaper before you should go full digital. Having a few choice mechanics tied to them is the way to go.

What does epaper get you that paper doesn't? A microprocessor and persistent state. RFID cards on a board game might be a good middle state for most cards. Scan them as played. Build gamestate or dynamics to be populated to epaper.

Epaper would be good for storyline branches, timeline progressions, evolving characters. Make them traveling characters being owned by different players. Differentiate them from becoming a static scoreboard that could be represented on a single tablet.

Yeah, I've been thinking evolving characters. Also more complex algorithms that you can't do on paper or in your head (and can't inspect).

When watching TV shows that have cool card games, like Yu-Gi-Oh, it seems like the game doesn't have rules, but instead the kids reason about the characters by looking at the pictures. Weird unexpected stuff happens all the time, I was thinking about how to implement that in the real world.

For example, imagine a vampire card that has its eyes closed. You try using it, but it doesn't do anything. But, you notice that when you play at night the eyes are open and now it's a powerful vampire!

So you can do time-based mechanics, I could add location-based mechanics. You can also make the cards do different things based on what other cards are in play.

Dwarf Fortress, the card game?

> When watching TV shows that have cool card games, like Yu-Gi-Oh, it seems like the game doesn't have rules, but instead the kids reason about the characters by looking at the pictures.

This is basically how it worked writing-wise in the original Duel Monsters series (though the characters acted like these were mostly all known effects/interactions), after that came GX where they toned down the creativity and mostly used real effects, then in Zexal and afterwards I think they stuck almost entirely to real effects with occasional exceptions.

I'll have to check out Duel Monsters, maybe can get some more inspiration. Have you ever seen Angelic Layer?

No, and to clarify I think you have seen it: Yu-Gi-Oh! is the name of the franchise and the original series that not many know about outside of the fandom, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters is the retooling that focused on the card game and was the first one to be officially translated to English, the one where the characters acted as you describe. There's been 7 spinoffs since then, the first two of which were Yu-Gi-Oh! GX and Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal.

Oh oh, gotcha. I only ever watched a few episodes when it was on TV in the US. And then a few more episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged ;)

Yep, Abridged was the Duel Monsters era. Just looked it up and seems it's still going (188 of the 224 original episodes done).

Oh wow, that's dedication

The card game in Yu-Gi-Oh had "rules as the plot demands", at least during the seasons with Yugi and Yami-Yugi.

When they released the real-world Dueling Monsters card game, they tried to keep the rules consistent with the manga/series, but changed them in places to make a more playable game. Ex.: there is an upper limit to the damage you can do with the Berserker Soul ability.

There's a huge genre of computer-only card games now, many of which implement these kind of "card evolution" mechanics.

If you're into this sort of thing, I highly recommend checking out Inscryption, it has some really fun twists on this idea.

A few people have told me I should play that game. Guess I know what I'm doing for the rest of the week :D

You should also try the new free to play game Marvel Snap. It's actually fairly good about not requiring you to pay money yet still offer some good progression and unlocks, and there's a lot of good ideas in there for cards which only really work in a digital way or with a bunch of counters (do some things randomly, or add a bunch of temporary and situational buffs to the cards, etc), while providing super fast games (like 3-5 minutes) with a tight and small deck of cards (a player's deck is only 12 cards), and every single card is unique. And you play on locations that also all have unique abilities.

I'm friends with a bunch of people in the board game industry, as well as being a game designer (with a game signed witha publisher that still hasn't been published yet after like, four years), and everyone thinks Marvel Snap is super fun and well designed (and addictive). It's the only mobile game I've really gotten into (that wasn't just a port of a physical board game) in several years.

Slay the Spire is another one to consider as well. It's a rogue-like game where you fight with cards and build up your deck based on the choices you make in the run. The cards are fairly static (they even made a board game adaptation on Kickstarter very recently), although they can all be upgraded, which makes the cards better. I play that on PC but I know it's out on mobile and Switch as well.

Ah yeah, I played Slay the Spire.

I still maintain that it's lame to implement the concepts tied to physical playing cards in a computer that can simulate anything. It's funny how Slay the Spire is a card game which got popular as a computer game and then later made the transition to a physical card game, bringing us full-circle.

Perhaps you should reach out to Prozd (suong won) if you got something solid to promote, or even discuss, he is a huge board game enthusiast.

I've enjoyed his videos :D I guess, sure I could try DM'ing him.

For sure, I hope you get some traction to your idea, it shows promise:

The thing about that is, now instead of just printing cards and some rules, interested parties now need to program at least a large portion of the game logic to make this work which increases their cost a large amount. (Not to mention that most trading card companies would not have the in-house capabilities to do that.) The thing that makes trading cards so popular for kids is that they are cheap. When I was at school the Kaiba starter deck for Yu-Gi-Oh was $30 and I got 50 cards, a mat for the game area, instructions and some art. A 2" e-ink display is like $10-15 wholesale which means for the same price (even adjusted for inflation) I'd receive maybe two cards at cost price. That would not be enough to keep 11 year old me entertained and as a parent I would not buy things that can be easily broken for my kids.

For what it's worth, the actual Yu-Gi-Oh trading card games has rules and the anime uses a very loose interpretation of those rules.

Yeah, I know. I've been trying to design it in a way to push costs down the whole time, but it's still a far cry from paper. My idea was to target $80 for a "starter kit", making it the equivalent purchase of a video game.

For interested parties needing to program, I could probably partner with them and do the development myself (or have employees do it). The real hard part is designing a game, the software to run it will be pretty basic to start with, once I write the general framework for taking turns, etc.

Could you have paper cards that have a barcode or qr code that are "activated" when placed into the console and then represented by your 2-3 E-Ink cards? Then the paper cards could be boosters/environment effects and all/some E-Ink cards are affected by them.

Ooh yeah, that's doable.

All of those are existing TCG mechanics, though easier and more flexible in digital-only TCG (hearthstone, snap).

For instance in MTG day/night cycles were featured in the original werewolves (I want to say innistrad), location mechanics can be continuous effects on lands or ETBs, likewise for reaction to other cards in play.

Some of the most effective app-asssisted games I've played involved hidden knowledge. Alchemists and Mansions of Madness in particular.

Something like Kingdom Death[1] where there’s a state cup campaign and characters are upgraded via accumulation of cards might be a good candidate

[1] nsfw https://shop.kingdomdeath.com/collections/in-stock/products/...

Thanks!

Yeah, it's a weird in-between. I don't think a game publisher would take a risk on it, but neither would silicon valley VCs.

Kickstarter would be my bet too. I was going to put this project down for a little while and start a "real" startup though.....

I could see people backing this on kickstarter even if it wouldn't actually be a game you'd play for a long time, because of just the novelty of being able to invite your friends over to show them these cool cards.

I might do that!

By the way, I've been following your posts here for years! I'll trade you cards for candy!

I feel like Kickstarter is more like a tactic than a strategy.

That said, this might be a good "real startup." The problem domain seems modest (e-ink playing cards) but... could be a bridgehead to interesting territory.

These might be designed/used as playing cards, but it's actually a computer with lots of little portable screens. The actual thing is general, a proverbial "computing paradigm."

These are playing cards, but could be concert tickets, conference badges, security doohickeys... They can open a door, clock you in and display your in/out status. If you want to go full "SV Pitch:" these cards are money. Transfer 69 FTX coins onto a card at a secure terminal, and pay by handing it to the hooker. A casino could give you one of these to be your wallet.

Solutions looking for problems sometimes find them. See apple/msft.

> Transfer 69 FTX coins onto a card at a secure terminal, and pay by handing it to the hooker.

Nah. Part of the strip club experience will always be showering the strippers in dollar bills... and why would you do regular payments for hookers with a special token?! Almost all credit and debit cards (=EMV cards) already can do this by NFC and you can also use watches and phones for this, the problem rather is:

- sex workers are pretty much banned from conventional payment methods and networks because sex work is illicit in many countries and even where it's legal, many sex workers prefer hard cash because chargeback fraud aka "post nut clarity" or actually stolen credentials is so common

- whenever you start a new payment scheme - because you are doing precisely this! - you WILL have to follow banking laws and regulations: customer identification, anti-smurfing and other money laundering measures, compliances for data protection, reports to banking authorities... an insane mess to do right. Of course, you can also hope to do a Bitcoin... but given the penalties if you are ever caught by the authorities, it's not worth it.

>> whenever you start a new payment scheme - because you are doing precisely this! - you WILL have to follow banking laws and regulations

Sure. Problems problems. The FTX coin reference was supposed to tongue-in-cheek over specifics. Yes payment systems have payment system problems.

My point is that these cards have all sorts of potential uses. They're a programmable physical tokens that display a fixed image until updated by physical contact with the plinth. Playing cards are just one set of use cases. The device itself is more general than that, potentially.

I think the road to a new ubiquitous technology often starts with toys.

> I don't think a game publisher would take a risk on it, but neither would silicon valley VCs.

You might still try for the latter. Especially if you can think of ways to make the business bigger.

Really? Any specific funds you think I should talk to?

Can intro me to anyone? email me: jonah@wyldcard.io

I was thinking, very possibly, if I found some angel investors who also love boardgames.....

GameStop NFT. Legacy company and progressive structure meets the very future everyone except Wall Street and their bought media wants. I'm strongly advising you at least leave an on-ramp and off-ramp section for their blockchain integration in your long-term designs.

Good point. It would almost make too much sense if GameStop's next crazy investment was an actual game. I'd go along with any crypto stuff they want if they give me a million bux :D

There is an Immutable X grant for $100 million.

Firstly super novel idea with tons of space for both technical and gameplay innovation. Really love it!

If we're talking business models, the one which immediately comes to mind as appropriate is that of a gaming console. Sell the hardware (e-cards, maybe a mat?) at a loss, then sell games for it at no marginal cost. Let other people build games for it because hit games are what sell platforms.

Since this essentially a portable gaming device, consumers may compare it to e.g. a Nintendo Switch - if you undercut the Switch and you have a blockbuster title or two, you could have incredible product on your hands.

Presumably the lucrative economics of trading card games could be applied here as well...!

Ooh hey, yes this could work.....

I think I'd need funding for that though, can't bootstrap a platform without that first blockbuster game.

Finally, a way to play physical Sabacc[1] in real life.

[1]: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sabacc

Scrolled to find this comment and was not disappointed.

I would like the word "skifter" to appear somewhere in this thread, in case anyone was looking for it as I was

I got a Sabacc deck someplace a few years back. I think it might have been from a storefront in Disney(land|World). But, it looks like you can also buy a set online from a few places.

My son was really into it for a while, but they included betting “credits” with the game that weren’t nearly as fun as normal chips would have been.

I'll add that to my list of fictional card games!

I took inspiration from Yu-Gi-Oh, Card Captors, Angelic Layer...

How thick would the e-ink version of this deck be:

https://i.redd.it/wufrxonvm0t41.jpg

I think the more troubling concern would be how much it would cost to manufacture that many of the e-ink cards, 5 figures easily

Yes, your docking station is effectively a primitive duel disc. The write-able cards are new, though.

I'll totally start a new project once holograms get good and cheap enough ;)

Seems like a bit of a solution waiting for a problem.

Given the current limitations in the system I would go with a monster battler game with a starter set of just 2 cards which would be yours and your opponents monster and then add a selection of power-ups/abilities these could be much cheaper components that could be played on the base station for an effect. These could be swipe cards or even just resistors basically anything that can be measured by the base station. With this hybrid system you could get the cool evolving over time monsters as well as lots of pieces to play with. Lots of scope for cool and hidden interactions. (Ideas taken from digimon tamers)

Ooh yes!!

Super cool. Taking a crack at rules for a game using this.

---

Sample game idea: CAKE DECORATION game - players have to try to decorate as many cakes as possible. Requires 10 cards.

One card is the 'design recipe' card and never leaves the base station. It shows an amount of ingredients, ex. "1 cup of buttercream, 3 shakes of sprinkles, 4 squirts of whipped cream".

Players start with either 3 blank cards or 3 random low-amount ingredient cards.

On a players turn, they select from three cards: each card is an ingredient, an amount, and a modifier. So cards could be "1 shake of sprinkles (2x)" "2 squirts of whipped cream (+1)" "1/4 cup of buttercream (+1/4)" (could make variations or add other kinds of things that might go on a cake)

The player draws a card, base station detects which card is missing, and the other two ingredient cards increase in amount based on the modifier value displayed on the card. ex. "1 shake of sprinkles with a 2x" will fully complete the recipe if not drawn for two turns (because 1 x2 x2 = 4 shakes, which is enough for the recipe)

With 4 cards in their hand, if the player can pay for the whole recipe, they win the round and get a point. On win, new recipe appears and all cards in the winning players hand and on the base station get rerolled to new low-amount ingredient cards. Score could be displayed on the margins of the recipe card.

If they cannot pay for the recipe, the player places a card back on the base station. And their turn is over. (Should ingredients be re-randomized when replaced on base station? Should that be a player decision whether to reroll it?)

First player to decorate N cakes wins the game.

---

I think something like this could make for a viable game with a low number of cards, but could be more fun with a greater number (17 ideally?) which would allow for 3 active recipe targets (+2), using the 4th slot for another ingredient and displaying recipe as a disconnected piece(s) (+1), and larger hand sizes (5 -> +4) to allow for more complex recipes

An interesting game design question is how random you want the cards to be? Fair random would probably be viable, but since the 'deck' can know and make decisions based on the state of cards not connected to the base station, you could deal unfairly if less randomness would make the game more interesting or fun.

oh my gosh, I love it! Thanks!

I'm glad you kept the total card count low, that's a limiting factor because of their price and size.

I'll try it out!

This is a really impressive project. That's an assload of new stuff to learn. Congrats on shipping.

Thanks! Well, not "shipped" per se. Nobody's got one but me so far :P

More shipped than most projects!

Love the Sefirot detail.

Is that what that's supposed to be?

Yup, going for a witchy occult mysticism vibe

That's actually interesting, and it's great that you decided to develop yourself in that field! Do you already have an insurance to protect your business? I can tell you that this type of policy is essential for running any type of business, and there are many sources of info like small business insurance twitter https://twitter.com/smallbizinsures acc that can help you with that. So I hope your business will flourish, good luck!

I guess the advantage of this setup, relative to playing a board game on an iPad, is that keeping info hidden from your opponent is more natural with cards. I suggest to exploit this, you either make the cards thin enough to hold in a hidden 'hand' the way someone might do in magic the gathering, or (much easier) have your plinth include a hidden hand prop section ala Scrabble.

In terms of product development, I think the best path would probably be to create or find an opensource game engine for cardgames and have a nice development environment plus API where a dev can write a game for the engine that either runs on a PC or runs on the cards, with no code changes required. (PC support makes debugging and iterating on game design much faster.)

I hadn't thought of a Scrabble style card holder, good idea.

Ah yeah, I think the game design community mostly uses tabletop simulator and one other such program for testing out ideas. Being able to deploy to both is a good idea.

I suppose the simplest path to success is just to integrate with tabletop simulator so that any card game playable on tabletop simulator can be played with your thing too. You could even aim to get acquired by them.

Product name: "Tabletop Simulator Simulator"

I haven't read all the comments here yet, but I reckon this would be cool to use as a dungeon exploration game. Each card is a room and you can lay them out as you explore new rooms. When certain events are triggered you put the card back on the machine to be shuffled then placed back where it was. Get in, get as much loot as you can and get out without dying.

If you haven't encountered it you should check out Legends Untold https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/legendsuntold/legends-u...

Obviously not eink, but exactly that kind of card game exploration.

Hadn't seen that one! Will check it out.

Oh cool, good idea!

Honestly 2 of these per person and 5 for the turn,flop,river - and we have a texas holdem game without cards and shuffling - just chips...

so a 6 person game, 12 of these + 5 ~ 17 of these ~ $450 ~ about the cost of real nice chips and cards...

Well, you could also 'just' put an iPad in the middle of the table for public game state (like turn, flop river in Poker), and everyone has their smartphone for private game state (like your hand in Poker) and you can play most boardgames quite nicely.

Instead of the iPad in the middle you could use a TV screen, too, but then you can't directly interact with that via touch screen.

hey, yeah! The commenter about the iPad is also right, but, there's something satisfying about the physicality.

That said, you can play poker with a deck of cards and a pile of beans.

But yeah, I'm looking for something somewhere between Poker and an iPad.

See my other comment, a lot of interesting mechanics are available.

I'd sell you a poker set if you want to impress your friends :D Email me: jonah@wyldcard.io

One card pp might be adequate for the hold cards. It's easy enough to represent two cards on one little screen. Feels tidier to me.

For holdem, you ideally need a plinth that can "deal" cards upside down. Maybe it's more general to have a plinth that can update cards in either orientation.

Congrants jonahss on your art. Thanks for sharing.

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.

> 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!

If you could put even a single button on the "card" itself, then it'll open up a whole layer of game design.

This isn't an actual game, but I'm thinking it would be great to pick a card face up that's "red" and be able to make a decision to turn it into "cyan". Others could pick "green" and "blue" face up, but can click a button to turn it to something else, and then the game resolves itself when everyone reveals it. Like if everyone can discuss and if everyone reveals the primary colors everyone wins.

I'm sure there's interesting game mechanics you can come up with when you give a decision to the player.

Additionally, I think this could make an interesting programmable suite of games. You don't have to sell just one game.

Agree on the suite of games, just like a deck of cards :)

Ah, the cards have buttons next to them on the base. I figured they could display icons on the card next to each button (each spot on the base has 3 right now). I call it the 'ATM' style UX.

A little switch on the card might be useful though. Especially if it can be set/unset by the base station (might be getting mechanically complicated).

For example, perhaps a game that has a general flow of: players have their cards, there’s a central base station, but most play is not digital. Maybe they somehow battle their cards, they can go around and battle people as much as they want, but their “moves” are tied to the switches and when they use a move, they flick the switch off (wonder if it could be made to actually get stuck in position, to provide physical feedback indicating that the moves are “used up.”)

Then, when they want, they go back to the Pokécenter — I mean, oops, base station. It recharges their abilities (unflips the switches), maybe runs some “level up” logic, etc etc.

I mean, this quickly started to stretch credibility as far as the mechanism goes, but the idea of giving the players/game designers a couple bits of state that they can toggle away from the base station might allow more asynchronous type games.

Whoah, interesting. I might noodle on that idea a bit.

Also a "write" push-button-switch could be useful if you have wireless update and are playing with less than scrupulously honest people (or children). Otherwise they might say the card "changed", because of a bug or similar excuse.

Those are commonly called "soft keys" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_key

Ah! Finally, I have a word for it!

I read a lot of these comments and people are thinking about traditional card games and electronic games of the past that are kinda sorta similar (but not really). They're missing the ONE HUGE ADVANTAGE of epaper displays: They don't need power.

It seems the big assumption everyone's making in the comments is that the displays will just stay there on the electronics box. The reality is that you can refresh the display and then take it back into your hand. You could even trade it with other players while disconnected.

Furthermore, these displays can be refreshed hundreds of thousands of times (some can do millions) and therefore can last a lot longer than regular cards. They're also stupidly cheap in bulk! Example of a cheap NFC-powered one: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803070283516.html (not the best example since it's kinda thick but you can get much thinner ones around the same price).

You just need to come up with some example games that take advantage of the trading dynamic. Also, if you're up to the engineering it would be neat if you could use one epaper "card" to modify another one. Much like how in many card games you can add an "enchantment" or "modifier" style card on top of another to give it additional capabilities.

I also recommend adding a cover or shutter to the cards so that they can be refreshed without the other players seeing what it is. Once the card is back in your hand you can move the cover out of the way and see what you got. Alternatively, you could make it so that the cards refresh their displays upside down. That way you can refresh it without anyone seeing what's there.

Yeah!

A few comments have mentioned being able to refresh the cards while upside down, or covered by another. Maybe my next prototype can put the contacts on the edges and have them wrap around or pass through, so they work on both sides.

That will be a bit more complexity for fabrication, but sounds like a fun project.

Would some kind of toaster-slot mechanism work? Contacts could be on the bottom edge, and with the right shape, you could have them extend a few millimeters onto the front and back, to get contacts on 3 sides.

I really like this and look forward to future iterations.

For anyone curious, the symbol made by the contacts is the Tree of Life from the kabbalah

Yeah, I'm going for an occult/mysticism/witchy vibe.

Magic the Gathering has a monopoly on fantasy, and the cyberpunk genre is played out. Plus I want the inner-workings to be somewhat mysterious.

I had a lot of fun thematically laying out the contacts. For example: Keter is VCC and Malchut is GND

> Keter is VCC and Malchut is GND

Beautiful

I love this. I dabble a bit in electronics as well as tabletop wargames and have always dreamed of having an interactive table with "moving" terrain, doors that open/close, LED's indicating some status of an objective, rotating walkways, that sort of thing. I think if you're plynth interface can be opensourced or licensed even, that you can do more than just play card games. How about track your games that support said interface? Wins, losses, draws, rewards. Not sure what the storage capacity is of the cards, but I see possibilities more in the form of combining Amiibo's with Steam's social features like achievements and the workshop.

This is very neat!

I don't think traditional board games would be interested unless you got the price down very very low ($2/unit or less).

I think you could make something happen if you marketed and packaged it as a "board game console" though. Like a fixed number of cards and larger boards, plus some sort of base station or phone app that'll flash everything to the starting state of a game of your choice. Then people buy new games digitally from you, same as a modern video game console.

(I'd be interested in the game dev facing API and writing some games for such a thing, so let me know if you're pursuing it and we can swap contact info.)

That’s a great idea! Rather than selling it as a single game, sell it as a platform that people can build on top of. There’s a pile of potential in that.

Yes please! Email me? jonah@wyldcard.io

This is really cool.

When the pandemic started, it seemed like there was an opportunity to build games where you still are participating in physical space, but certain aspects of the game are shared across a network and then transform back into something that occupies physical space. I thought that could be something like AR but your cards open up other doors.

It would be fascinating to have a deck that shares cards in multiple distant places, with people playing the game from far away but connected through your cards.

Adding an element of time delay to the synchronization of the deck would be fun too.

Please provide a way to follow along on your progress, like a mailing list! Such a great project.

Oh! I've got a mailing list signup on wyldcard.io !

Should have added that call-to-action to my post; *facepalm

Your idea is kind of like the hologram chess that Ed plays in Cowboy Bebop

added mailing list signup to the bottom of that post, thanks.

My friends and I did that with gloomhaven.

You have your local deck and player, and then the actual board is on TTS

This is incredible! I'm so excited to see what you do with this in the future.

May I ask what e-ink displays you're using?

Bought off Alibaba, I think they're so cheap because they're designed for grocery store shelf price tags.

Good Display GDEW029T5D

Trading or collectible card games that have cards that modify themselves with play would be great here. SolForge is the example I'm thinking of, but I'm sure other games do it too.

I was thinking trading cards too, but thinking of specifically trading them.

I wasn't really watching the images in the demo video, so at first I though he was transferring one image to another. This made me think it would be really cool if there were exactly one way to get a new image on your card: put it on a device that swaps two cards. You'd get a new image, but they'd lose theirs. So you'd actually have to commit to trading.

I guess that sounds a little like NFTs, but hopefully without the douchey scamminess.

That't a neat idea. I was thinking of genetic algorithms for 'breeding' cards, and maybe AI image synthesis for the pictures?

I thought it'd be so cool if all the cards from one town look one way, and they're different the next state over. So when you go on a school trip, you can pick up cards not available in your area.

I mean CCG is kinda the original MFT scam. Look at how MtGox got started.

And baseball cards predate that

I don’t see that as quite the same since they actually had some value when the only way to get stats was a newspaper

How did the value of seeing those stats make a first edition Babe Ruth card worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?

I mean, yes, everything has value. I can write a memo in an NFT that I don't want to forget. Obviously we're talking about the value as compared to the price.

Yeah! I'm thinking a mixture of Magic the Gathering and Tamagotchi. Where the cards can level and grow like an RPG.

I'm imagining someone casting a spell on another player and the cards in their hand change without them realizing right away. That would really add to the magical feeling of the game.

So cool! I love it!

Have a look at https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/194607/mystic-vale where cards grow during the game. It's implemented physically.

> Mystic Vale uses the innovative "Card Crafting System", which lets you not only build your deck, but build the individual cards in your deck, customizing each card's abilities to exactly the strategy you want to follow.

You would probably want to go with fewer cards. But something like a deck builder could work.

I've got the starter set sitting at home :D Haven't played it yet, but wanted to check it out.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/23451/space-dealer also has some interesting mechanic idea (with the timers) that you could steal for something with your setup. Assuming the cards or at least base station themselves have enough logic for a timer.

That's something that goes tastefully beyond what pure normal playing cards can do.

Thanks, I'll check that one out too.

Timers are totally doable.

It would let you make a real version of Inscryption under any of the different game varieties

RIP Solforge. That was my favorite digital card game before it crashed and burned, then resurrected and finally fizzled out.

Can someone recommend some cheap ESL (as mentioned by other comments), that's easily hackable (as in a push an image to it without much troubles)? Many need proprietary base stations, some use NFC, but I'm looking for something with Bluetooth or ZigBee (or similar). Basically I want simple frame that would update with calendar events (or something), so NFC is not suitable and I don't want to buy expensive base station with lots of extra cruft (especially for one tag)

I can see this unlocking a new class of card games. Instead of buying a different set of cards, players would only need to buy one set of these e-ink cards, which could be used across a completely new marketplace of card games. They have the benefit of being more interactive and thus more immersive/engaging, albeit they seem a little unwieldy (the form factor could improve to make them thinner).

Can you file a patent for something like this? If you can, then I would explore that option.

Anyway to add NFC. I imagine a special gameboard which sends data to the cards based on game state.

Very impressive!

Heh heh, that's like phase 4 ;)

I want kids to be able to play at school or at camp, so didn't add any connectivity. Plus I'm trying to stay cheap. But I can imagine adding bluetooth to the base or to your phone or something. Then I can go all "BILLS PC" and let you store your spirits on the cloud, let you load them in and out of cards, etc etc.

Except I don't want to turn it into an online game. Computer games are awesome, I think it's lame to emulate physical cards with a computer, a'la' Hearthstone.

I think that NFC ends up cheaper than Bluetooth. For one thing, you don't need a battery. (And you shouldn't need a battery on your current design either, since you are changing the screen while connected to a dock which can have power)

Ah yeah, the current cards do not have batteries.

If this was a fully hackable product, it could be used for so much more than just playing games. Think the stuff that e-ink price tags are already used for, e.g. in product retail, plus so many uses in the office; no need to awkwardly write things down on post-its or simple slips of paper, when they can instead be shown on a trading card with information being reliably drawn from a single source of truth.

I'm down to make it fully hackable.

The trick would be an easy interface for writing to them. They don't have batteries, so you need to send all the power to them along with information.

Maybe you could use a handheld scanner type device to load the next image and send power to each card, or an electronic Rolodex where you stack the cards and it flips through a set amount reconfiguring them. Both of those ideas would require some hardware development though.

I forgot to add: very interesting project and amazing to see the fruition of your efforts!

This is really cool! I had the same idea but dismissed it because e-inks were so expensive, it's really impressive you can get them down to $10. This enables you to make games that are digital and analog at the same time, which is in itself interesting. I think this tech combines well with NFTs to extend this functionality (if you need unique cards, unforgable etc.).

For anyone checking back here: Someone suggested I start a Discord server. Feel free to join: https://discord.gg/DXr2eWPk

The tree of life shaped connector is pretty awesome. It is very fitting with the tarot aesthetic.

There are so many wonderful applications of this! I am always interested in tabletop card games, but I don’t want to manage running calculations for things like my hp, or current stat buffs. Something like this could open up complex interactions and game state, without burdening the player.

ha! these are rad. But tbh they look more like electronic dominos. The docking station makes them less card like too (but love the way you've arranged the contacts)

Ah thanks, I worked hard on the contacts.

There's a thin and flexible e-ink display I could use instead, but they're $20 each instead of $4. I agree they're a bit chunky in this form :)

I agree the docking station detracts a bit from the naturalness of just playing on a table.

I decided to build what middle-school-me would have wanted to play with. I took a lot of inspiration from Yu-Gi-Oh which has the same docking station concept (just executed much better, where you wear it on your wrist).

it looks great - its not often the electronics portion of a project is executed with aesthetics in mind.

This is amazing - but don't just limit yourself to table top games. While the killer app has not popped into my head I am sure there are business uses as well - from name tags to ... err - but just the very existence of these things means people will find new uses. fantastic

The trick then, would be making an easy way to write images to them. Maybe a phone attachment...

Reverse wireless charging and NFC or usb-c to usb-c cable

Could be a really cool way to play complex "choose your own adventure" games. Like "Hand of Fate" for example, you'd only need three or four cards. Could even do it with two. A game like "Reigns" you could even play with a single card

I never got into it, but I could see this having some use for AR D&D, and while it enables new games, show how it could be used in existing popular games today so that people can understand it and how it could enable/change existing games in new ways.

This is incredibly cool & inspiring. How familiar were you with Rust before starting? Any resources you can share for programming the circuit boards you use? I've had some embedded Rust ideas myself but am not sure where to start!

Thanks!

I knew no Rust at all before starting. Yikes was it frustrating to learn a completely new language. I had to go through the whole rust book, not skipping any basics, in order to get there. I also assigned myself a homework assignment to get used to the concepts. See the other blog post on wyldcard.io/blog

Honestly, by the time I got to the finished prototype, I could have just done the whole thing with Javascript. Although intending to use an SDM32F7 for the finished project, it was really convenient to use a raspberry pi for development. Using VS Code, I could program remotely on the pi from my Mac and iterate really quickly.

the awesome-embedded-rust[1] repo was very helpful.

TBH, embedded rust really feels like it's not ready for hobbysists who aren't embedded experts already.

[1] https://github.com/rust-embedded/awesome-embedded-rust

Sweet product! I always thought pet name tags would be a fantastic application for this!

I'm confused. Do you rename your dog every week?

Ha! No, but you can imagine people like to personalize everything. MLB season, perhaps you'd like to have a Dodgers themed tag, NFL switch to the... Raiders? Change of address? Phone number changes? People are creative. I'm sure they'd use it in ways you can't imagine.

perhaps he has a high turnover rate?

I have to go cry now.

Can I make a pet tag for my NTF charizard?

Echoing everybody else here, really neat!

Questions:

Do the cards contain any battery? I’m wondering if they have always-running CPUs in there, or if all the compute happens in the base (and then it just writes to the screen).

I guess color eInk would probably be cost-prohibitive, huh?

Thanks!

Yup, you called it. The cards are totally passive. Just the screen and an eeprom memory chip, no battery.

All the compute happens in the base.

Color e-ink way too expensive for now, but if Wizards of the Coast wants to invest 100MM we can make em in color, thinner, and flexible!

> Color e-ink way too expensive for now, but if Wizards of the Coast wants to invest 100MM we can make em in color, thinner, and flexible!

100% makes sense. eInk is so frustrating sometimes, I wish somebody had an application that used a bazillion of the things so they’d get some economy of scale going. You are just going to have to make these things the next Magic to solve the scaling issue.

> Yup, you called it. The cards are totally passive. Just the screen and an eeprom memory chip, no battery.

Sensible way of doing it.

For a game like Talisman, your player token could the the card. It would be nice to have the pins inside the game board, though, so that you could just place your token on a special location, and an event happens. This would require a powered board, though, which kind of detracts from the idea that the games could be played disconnected.

That'd be cool! Talisman is an entertaining game.

I think the reason I was able to buy these e-innk displays so cheap is that they're the exact size of grocery store shelf price tags.

I'm no expert on the subject, but wouldn't this be awesome as an addition to DnD or other tabletop RPGs? Like the card could be a great way to display and update player characters stats and information.

I REALLY love this idea. The way that this could combine the tactile nature of physical games with the benefits of digitization is awesome. The example you gave somewhere of the vampire card is so cool.

Thanks! You get it!

I applaud that you made a thing, and it's cool that you learned Rust, wrote a driver, did CAD, 3D printed... the works! It's far more than I can do.

But let's say all trading cards in the world were like the e-ink ones you invented, and then somebody came along and said, "I printed 52 trading cards on glossy card paper, in vibrant color. They are 1 millimeter thick, weigh practically nothing, and cost about a penny each to produce. The drawback is you have to shuffle them in your hands".

The paper version would be a massive upgrade in almost every sense.

The e-ink screen changes much more than that:

>The cards also contain a memory chip, so they can store stats, moves, and keep changes and status effects from one game to the next. ... >I think these cards have the potential to unlock a new paradigm of tabletop gaming. They are rooted in the physical world, but can implement complex game mechanics run by a computer.

e.g. Magic The Gathering has a TON of modifiers - +1/1 counters, etc - and this could live-update and keep track of those in a physical/offline setting.

Can I load up whatever images I want? The dream would be proxying Magic cards for playtesting. If you could load net-decks and shuffle via an app over NFC somehow, that'd be amazing as well!

Lots of possibilities here!

Pretty much any image you want, but it's only 4-color greyscale and pretty low resolution. I'd have to make a nicer UX than the current "scp the images onto the raspberry pi" setup I have now.

Most proxies are crudely sharpied words over other cards, so the low-res 4-color greyscale is a huge improvement haha

This looks pretty cool! I know that HN is very bearish on crypto, but I could see this or something like it be used by a crypto company to promote NFTs in conjunction with a card game or something like that.

Easily see game being game of something like these — or drumroll, NFTs.

I love it ! you should make a color version [1] !

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31191850

Ha! I'm really trying to keep the price down, these are the cheapest screens I could find and they're still ~$4.

If they took off and were produced at scale, we could definitely do color, and make them thinner and flexible as well!

Where do you get the screens from? Brand/type?

Bought off Alibaba, I think they're so cheap because they're designed for grocery store shelf price tags.

Good Display GDEW029T5D

Amazing!! Are you taking orders? Have you considered setting up an Etsy where you can sell a few of them for $100 per tile when you feel like making a couple now and then?

oh dang! I'd totally sell the cards, for less than that even. Sign up for the mailing list on wyldcard.io and if you shoot me an email I'll totally sell you cards, and even a base station (though those are pricier)

jonah@wyldcard.io

Love it! I suppose it's possible to display animations right? If so it'd be very cool to play Yu-Gi-Oh! and Magic with animated cards. Endless possibilities.

Animations seem to be a tricky prospect for e-ink displays. Definitely possible, but may require more expensive hardware? I've seen pebble watches and remarkable tablets which can do it amazingly well, maybe I just need better firmware...

Update speeds are going to be too slow for meaningful animations. Also, the lifecycle of the display is measured in screen refreshes, so having to flash through the animation frames would shorten the life for sure.

A very simple game could be Rock-Paper-Scissors if you can add a gyroscope or something to detect shaking and then show Rock, Paper or Scissor at random.

Sorry for adding more work. :)

I believe they don't have any batteries in them but only powered when connected to the dock. E-ink only requires power when changing the image, not for displaying it.

I just noticed this project, Inkplate 2. Definitely more expensive but maybe some useful ideas there.

https://www.hackster.io/news/the-inkplate-2-is-a-tiny-self-c...

I think this is a really good idea. Just imagine being able to open source rulesets and cards and being able to load them into your deck on a moments notice, and your friends being able to do the same. I hope that you make this work, I would easily pay 200$ for a deck if there were a few games to choose from and a platform to build my own rulesets and cards and load them into the physical cards.

You should probably start talking to a patent attorney right about now. 99% chance this goes nowhere, 1% chance you're the next Gary Gygax.

I'd settle for Richard Garfield ;)

You think I should patent? Isn't that going to cost me like 20 grand? Plus if Wizards of the Coast really wants to, they can work around my patents somehow.

If I could patent for only a couple thousand dollars maybe I would..... But I WANT other game developers to use this idea. Just, if they want to skip ahead, they can work with me, I'd be happy to share.

I think it's a cool idea, but couldn't begin to guesstimate what the underlying IP might be worth if anything. It may already be pretty well covered by other patent claims, for that matter.

I do think it's cool enough to be worth spending a few $K to consult with an attorney, though, especially since you've taken it this far. Mistakes made early in the process of commercializing something can have disproportionate effects later on.

If it does turn out to be patentable, you have up to 1 year to file after first public disclosure (IIRC), and that clock is now ticking, for better or worse.

Thanks, I've got a patent attorney in the family; I'll see if I can get a discount ;)

This is so cool. I'm a sucker for card games and e-ink, so to get both in one serving is VERY exciting. Thanks for being an innovator :)

Very nice! Congratulations!

From a long time ago I'm trying to build a e-ink magnet for the fridge with relevant updated relevant information about some school programs.

But I haven't really found a cheap e-ink display.

Edit: I see that you answered it:

>Bought off Alibaba, I think they're so cheap because they're designed for grocery store shelf price tags. Good Display GDEW029T5D Where do you get yours for $20?

You can get displays from Adafruit for $22 [0] or from Waveshare [1] even cheaper if you're willing to do a little more work. I've used both and they're both pretty nice.

[0] https://www.adafruit.com/product/4777

[1] https://www.waveshare.com/product/displays/e-paper.htm

Oh the display is only like $4-6 on Alibaba. After you add the resin and my custom PCB it's like $20 at the low scale I'm purchasing.

Actually, the cards already have magnets in em, so these would work on your fridge already.

But you need a base station to update them, and a way to connect to your network to upload images/text.....

If you email me your address, I'd be happy to send you one for your fridge :D

This is huge. Are you going to sell these as kits?

Oh, that's not a bad idea. I could do a kickstarter, sell kits or fully-assembled ones that way. It would be about $300-$400 for 3 cards and a base in this iteration and at low volumes.

Think I should do it?

This is too expensive though :( and more importantly, 3 cards is too few cards.

How low you think the cost per card can go?

edit: elsewhere you quoted $80 for the base and 3 cards so if that's your target it seems more reasonable. but 3 cards is also too little, maybe a kit with 5 cards is better

Digital Tarot readings would be a possible use for this. You'd need to program the thing to randomly turn cards 180 degrees.

Yeah! I was going for a Tarot/Occult vibe.

Turning 90 degrees... maybe I could do some magic with magnets.....

I meant more that when you put the 'card' into the slot, at random the image displayed is rotated 180 degrees (like it could be in a real deck of cards) so that the image is upside-down. A simple transform function.

This is amazing! I’ve fantasized about doing something similar—-what resources did you use to pick up all of those skills?

I come from a web dev background, and spent the last 3 years running the cloud and embedded firmware teams for a 3D printer startup. I learned that hardware isn't so hard, once you get past all the mystery. My coworkers gave me tips on which tools to use, and helped me when I got stuck.

The best advice I got was "Read the datasheet"

The biggest step for me was deciding to spend money on experimenting. With a budget, suddenly it was fun to order stuff, buy tools, try things out.

Rust Book was the best for learning Rust.

I've got the same mindset with a hardware project I worked on. I gave myself more free rein to just buy equipment and tools all in the name of "the project".

I spent about $5000 over two years. Not bad at all, really. A lot of that was registering an LLC and a Fusion360 license.

Amazing project - I love the art on the "cards"! Who was your artist or where did you source it from?

Ahh... I used Stable Diffusion!

I think this is one of the most impressive parts to me. I would be comfortable approaching the embedded and mechanical aspects of this project, but I don't have the drawing skills. Being able to generate decent card designs for a demo deck is awesome.

The whole game development community is embracing ai image synthesis, especially for prototyping.

This is really interesting jonahss, well done for completing it! Have you looked at the physical games and convention spaces?

Things like DnD roleplaying games or Megagames could both use something like this.

I'd personally be interested in both those applications, what kind of wireless communication can they do?

Oh for sure, I'm hoping to inspire the game developer community. I know a lot of things using electronics have been tried in the past and it usually comes out as a gimmick, but I tried to design these to hide their electronic nature, hoping to enter the same spot that dice and counters inhabit.

I was going to post about it on some game dev forums next, any suggestions of where I should post?

They don't do wireless as of now, they have to sit on the plinth to get an update. There are options for how to add some form of wireless connectivity.

I'd be interested in continuing the conversation, I'll send you an email, or email me: jonah@wyldcard.io

I know you probably have nothing besides the display in the card to keep it small, but that probably increases the number of Pogo pins you need if you need to run the entire display protocol over Pogo. If you had a demultiplexer in the card you could use only 3 Pogo pins.

I wish it were pogo pins, but they're so expensive. I'm using spring fingers and they're surprisingly reliably and durable (so far).

I'll look into using a demultiplexer, because maybe then I could afford the pogo pins.

Look into Dallas Semiconductor 1-Wire. Could do it with 2 pogos.

That is a really cool idea! I really want to see what kind of new games that can be created from this.

Thanks! Yeah me too! I've got an idea for a game, but I'm not an experienced game designer. If others want to try to design a game for it, I'd be open to sharing with them :D

Mostly wanted to inspire something new.

This could actually replace mtg, which has run its course, jumped the shark and is on its deathbed.

I so agree! MTG is desperately scraping the bottom of barrel for new mechanics.

That's why I wanted to get this concept out there, to inspire the next thing.

I haven't played MTG in ages, and decided to check out their website to see what the new cards are like. Aoparently there's a new mechanic "More than meets the eye" letting you cast Optimus Prime for one less mana...? Apparently it's just, part of the Brothers' War set now. It's like those fortnite ads I see for Naruto or Goku being in the game now. Games just aren't allowed to have their own aesthetic anymore because crossover deals are apparently too profitable. Totally felt off.

I feel ya.

Amazing and so many possibilities. Good luck for your future. Many good ideas here ...

Damn, impressive OP. This looks really nice. The design of everything is awesome.

Thanks!

My very first thought on seeing this was - hey, we could finally implement Sabaac as it's described in the Star Wars novels, with the morphing card mechanics and everything.

Off topic, but where are you getting e-ink display from. I could think of lot of usage for them if they don't require any refresh or power and is available for $10.

Oh, the screen alone is less than $10.

Bought off Alibaba, I think they're so cheap because they're designed for grocery store shelf price tags.

Good Display GDEW029T5D

Dude, that’s a whole lot of accomplishments. Super impressive.

Looks awesome. I just want to use it to play three card monte.

Oh hey, I've been looking for small demo games to implement on it, before jumping into a massive RPG or something. I can try implementing that.

Add an accelerometer to the card so it can wait until it's face down to swap the picture. :)

Hm, that'd work with the other comment about putting contacts on both sides.

The cards themselves are completely passive and unpowered. Base does everything.

This may be useful to generate random charactersistics / powers / hit's health cost (in case of a character card) or text for event based cards.

Ooooh, I love this! Are the design file available somewhere?

Ah, not at this time, but maybe I should open source em?

Yes, please do!

Really interesting idea and I can see many game mechanics that benefit. What do you think is the minimum thickness using any technology available?

Oh, if you were willing to spend $50 a card, I think you can get them down to the thickness of a credit card.

If you are willing to spend even more, you could bundle the card circuitry with the silicon embedded in the e-ink display already, and there are FPC e-ink displays. So it'd be about half the thickness of a credit card and flexible!

(at that point, we'd need to change the plinth interface, probably go for NFC like people are mentioning in these comments)

My first thought is card battler

You could actually have a characters 'hitpoints' accurately reflected instead of having to keep track of, ala Hearthstone.

yeah!

Does it needthe power source and logic? Could you have some kind of pogo pin or contact on the base and make them thinner/cheaper?

Great work, this is awesome. I’d love to connect and hear about your journey. I’ve always wanted to make a board game.

Love to! Email me? jonah@wyldcard.io

Kind of perfect for a travel mahjong set where you don't have a table to shuffle a bunch of tiles on!