There’s a new breed of gaming rulebook in town, and it’s not really a rulebook at all.
With the holidays afoot, newcomers and veteran gamers alike will be adding tabletop titles to their gift lists, hoping for something fresh and exciting to sink their teeth into. The trouble with a new game, though, is tackling the rulebook before you can even begin playing. Page after page of brand-spankin’-new information can be alarming, whether you read the guidelines of the game first, or during play.
The founders of Playmore Games, Jouni Jussilla and Tomi Vainikka, have established a cutting-edge opportunity for gamers to master a board game without the struggles of the rulebook, but through the familiarity and ease of the players’ own smart device.
Dized is an app that teaches the rules and steps of a game through voice-over, text, and animations, as the game is being played. The app offers tutorials and setup guides, a search engine for quickly finding specific rules, and alternative rulesets if you want to shake things up a bit. The tutorial even keeps track of what the players have already learned. These additional insights into the board game are what make Dized different from viewing a “how to” video on Youtube. The app is updated as the games are, and is interactive enough to tend to your questions as you play.
Free to download on Google Play, with iOS coming soon, tutorials within the Dized app will be priced on a case-by-case basis as they are added to the Dized library, which currently features Race to the North Pole, published by Playmore Games themselves, and will soon host Bang! by dV Giochi.
“Our goal is that in a few years the library of tutorials in Dized will be so vast, that no matter which game you pick from your shelf, you can just skip the manual and start playing immediately, ” says product manager Anna Lapinsh in the app’s press release. “Just like in video games, in the future you will not need to read a manual to start playing.”
The future of board gaming could very well include the likes of Dized, as technology continues to leak into different aspects of gaming as a whole. For many, this technology could relieve the anxiety of joining the board game community due to lack of experience, and can offer gaming veterans a contemporary way to digest a game, whether they’ve played it before or not.
Do you and yours have trouble with the traditional board game rulebook? If not, is something like Dized still interesting to you, in order to more easily learn the ins and outs of a game? Let’s discuss in the comment below, or find me on Twitter @bekahbabble!
Featured Image, Logo, and Art Credit: Playmore Games