Board games are great fun, but they take up considerable storage space and require gathering all your friends. All on Board! is looking to change that by creating a holistic board game platform in VR.
All on Board! lets you play board games with your friends either locally or online and is developed by The Game Kitchen. The idea is that you digitally purchase a board game, like Terraforming Mars, and then you and your friends can play together without needing everyone to buy it. It evokes that feeling of going to a friend’s house for a game night and each bringing your favorite one.
Currently, there is no automatic enforcement of the rules of each game. That means if you want to reach across the table and grab your friend’s card or move your piece forward when no one’s looking, you can. Some of the more tedious parts of the games are fortunately automated, like recalling dice at the end of a turn, but full rule enforcement is something the studio plans to implement as a toggleable feature further down the road.
All on Board! is being designed as a live-service platform, so it doesn’t have all the features the developers want in it just yet. During a preview at Gamescom 2024, the team told UploadVR that they planned to add one new board game per month, as well as a new feature every two to three months. I believe it will benefit from this when more games arrive and it becomes more feature-complete. Players will also be able to add their own games to it one day.
Because Meta and Steam handle the licensing of these digital board games, that means you won’t truly own your purchases. All on Board! is also run from peer-to-peer servers, so if the worst happens and The Game Kitchen abandons the game after a few years, you can still use it to play with friends.
At launch, All on Board! will feature mixed reality as well as crossplay. Currently, it feels a bit finicky to play, and movement requires you to grab the board table and drag yourself around. The most popular board games are also currently absent. Each game does, however, contain a unique environment to play it in, which adds some fantastic immersion, while card and piece details can be expanded and made easier to read from a distance.
All on Board! will reach Steam and the Meta Quest platform in early 2025.
