That's Entertaible!

Just got a link to the Entertaible, which looks about 30" x 20" or so, with a touch-sensitive surface. Philips wants to use it at bars, restaurants, and maybe have a home version, so that folks can play multiple boardgames/quizgames/whatever on it.

This'd be just the thing for the remaining geezers with tweezers (I kid, I kid!) that play hex-based wargames, but no sane developer is gonna chase that market, because if there's 100,000 hex wargamers in the United States, I'd be surprised. Being able to play something like Civ4 face-to-face would be cool.

Here were some ideas a coworker and I came up with in a few minutes discussion:

• Replace the Giant-Box-O-Standard-Games with this thing. Throw on chess, checkers, parchisi, backgammon, chutes and ladders, Chinese checkers, 20 different kinds of solitaire, maybe scare up a license for Monopoly. Throw those in with one cool game when you buy it.

• A multiplayer RTS suited for the platform. Something that would work well with the limited UI options (touchscreen).

• An as-yet uninvented game where both the pieces and the board can move, with the board shifting under the pieces.

Probably be overpriced and underpowered, but heck, anything can happen.