Copyright MassLive
Most people have amassed a shelf full of board games somewhere in their home, with new additions occasionally joining the collection on birthdays and holidays. But what if the next game you buy is the last one you’ll ever need? That’s the promise behind Board, a new startup aiming to reinvent family game night. Its $500 “founder edition” device blends physical game pieces with a flat-screen display. It comes with a curated library of family-friendly titles in one sleek package. The first units start shipping this week. While the company is headquartered in New York, the executive overseeing game development, Seth Sivak, lives in Somerville. And CEO Brynn Putnam is a Harvard alum who sold her last company, Mirror, to Lululemon in 2020, netting $500 million. Sivak grew up in Groton playing video games like Mario Kart with his brothers on the couch. They always had a gaming console with four controllers, he said, “because we wanted to all play together all the time. That’s just gone now from games,” which have become a more solitary experience or involve playing against online opponents who may live anywhere on the planet." With Board, he said, “we want to create a new type of experience for families — or for really anyone — to socially play together, because more and more video games are focused on online play, headphones on, [with a] single player and single screen." Board is launching with a dozen games, none of which are established titles such as Risk or Clue. Sivak said that there were some discussions about licensing games that people already know, including Dungeons and Dragons, but “we felt like, from a product standpoint ... this was not necessarily [for] people that wanted just a digitized version of Monopoly. “I don’t think that people are like, ‘I just want the same board games I’m used to playing in a digital format,’ because that exists on the iPad,” he continued. “Why would you need another device for that?” Board enlisted outside game design studios to build the initial batch of games, with a focus on creating “totally new experiences,” Sivak said. Among the games that come with Board out of the box are Strata, a strategy game inspired by Tetris and chess; a virtual pet game called Mushka and Spycraf, which Sivak described as a “virtual escape room.” Games typically involve using game pieces to interact with the device; the Board comes with nearly 50 pieces, each specific to a particular game. Space Rocks uses colorful spaceships; Omakase, a sushi-themed game, involves chopsticks. “We really wanted to make it so that this device has games that let kids play it by themselves, let kids play with other kids, let kids and parents play together, [and] let parents enjoy, you know, with a glass of wine,” Sivak said. The company plans to release more of its own games and encourages other developers to create games for the Board device, Sivak said. The startup is also exploring ways for Board owners to design their own games or new levels for existing games. Creating a wide variety of games that people will want to play repeatedly will be crucial to Board’s long-term success, said Eric Janszen, an entrepreneur who runs a startup called VirZoom. Board games have been around since roughly 3100 BCE, when Egyptians played Senet with each other. The entertainment landscape is quite different in 2025. For Board, it may be “tough to compete with the immediacy and infinite variety offered by YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, shooter games — none of which existed when board games first came out," Janszen said. (His company, VirZoom, builds games that combine virtual reality equipment with exercise.)
