With the Beta of the Last Game Board coming to a close I thought I would share with the D&D community some feedback and thoughts.
So why am I posting the feedback? I requested a refund for this product which both the community manager confirmed (and later retracted) and the owner of the company said "we can process what you need". After requesting multiple times through support this has not yet come to fruition.
Since it is just a paperweight at the moment (read below for more details) if this post dissuades just one person from making the same mistake I did in buying this board I will at least feel I've done my part in ensuring the grossly incorrect information and marketing of the board don't continue to waste people's money in the D&D community.
This is the feedback that has been shared through multiple avenues with the product owners through Discord, Zoom, and their email support.
Before I mention my full thoughts you may ask yourself - what is this Gameboard? According to their site:
Want to play D&D (or other board games) remotely with a friend or family member, but miss being able to use your minis (or chess pieces)?
Now you can use your minis and so can you opponent ! As you move your character across the board, remote players can see your moves in real-time with virtual tokens on their Gameboard, and vice-versa!
To preface my feedback - I've run D&D on Foundry for 4 years (both "professionally" as a paid DM as well as for in-person games) and have developed multiple modules for the platform as well. I know most of the in and outs of the Software so I feel in a good place to give thoughts about the Foundry experience on Gameboard.
My main use case for the gameboard was to replace my in-person D&D setup to mix and match the convenience of Foundry VTT and a physical way to interact with the maps, take advantage of a line of sight, lights, etc.
Here is the current state:
The foundry app won't correctly load 95% of the time.
Sometimes when it loads you will get the full grey screen full grey screen (have to hard reset gameboard). This post from Reddit is a bit outdated but reaffirms the same experience I've had after running with approx. 40 different players over the last few years. Only those with hardware issues and less powerful machines had this issue.
Load times are approx. 30 seconds to 2 minutes on non-animated webm maps.
Basic webm maps will only yield 6-12 FPS on the gameboard. For comparison, my 6 year old surface with no dedicated graphics will run approx. 15 fps on the same map
With any modules loaded, the screen half loads - the other half becomes fully black and unusable - after some investigation, I discovered this issue is caused by incompatibility with Dice So Nice module ( a 3d dice module).
Gameboard module is still on V9 and hasn't been updated in 6 months
Looking in the hooks for the gameboard module (https://foundryvtt.com/packages/gameboard-support) I can see it's setting core foundry to low-performance mode with this code snippit "game.settings.set('core', 'performanceMode', 'SETTINGS.PerformanceModeLow');"
This clearly shows that the Gameboard team knows this is an issue. I was able to watch a recent "office hours" for Foundry in which there were two other users who asked some good questions.
The only real response I've received from Gameboard is "Foundry is working on optimizing it". This statement is true but is not specific in the slightest to Gameboard. This applies to ALL hardware. Foundry has been optimizing as they release each major version. Each version gets better performance. I am sure that the next version of Foundry will work better on the gameboard...just like it will on my 5-year-old surface. This does not resolve the underlying issue of the device hardware and Gameboard specific module.
The answers confirm a lot of my concerns and the summarized information I took away were:
Gameboard is not performant enough (and is compared to an old phone in the video )
We really hope that in 5 months when V11 is released that will maybe make it usable for "base" setups without a lot of modules/animations
Buy the upgraded hardware when we release it if you want Foundry to work properly
As mentioned above if this post dissuades just one person from making the same mistake I did in buying this board I will count my community service as complete
If you'd like to know any additional info or "proof" of support interactions feel free to PM me!
Yep that's summed it up very well - although I don't think the hardware can be "fixed" unless they overhaul their base equipment
There are a lot of other options (including Touch TV's) that are much better at this time if you are looking for a "stay in one spot" sort of setup
There are some interesting things 'Material Plane' is doing that I've been following for some time (no affiliation) and I may take a stab at one of the kits when it releases in the next few months
With the Beta of the Last Game Board coming to a close I thought I would share with the D&D community some feedback and thoughts.
So why am I posting the feedback? I requested a refund for this product which both the community manager confirmed (and later retracted) and the owner of the company said "we can process what you need". After requesting multiple times through support this has not yet come to fruition.
Since it is just a paperweight at the moment (read below for more details) if this post dissuades just one person from making the same mistake I did in buying this board I will at least feel I've done my part in ensuring the grossly incorrect information and marketing of the board don't continue to waste people's money in the D&D community.
This is the feedback that has been shared through multiple avenues with the product owners through Discord, Zoom, and their email support.
Before I mention my full thoughts you may ask yourself - what is this Gameboard? According to their site:
To preface my feedback - I've run D&D on Foundry for 4 years (both "professionally" as a paid DM as well as for in-person games) and have developed multiple modules for the platform as well. I know most of the in and outs of the Software so I feel in a good place to give thoughts about the Foundry experience on Gameboard.
My main use case for the gameboard was to replace my in-person D&D setup to mix and match the convenience of Foundry VTT and a physical way to interact with the maps, take advantage of a line of sight, lights, etc.
Here is the current state:
Looking in the hooks for the gameboard module (https://foundryvtt.com/packages/gameboard-support) I can see it's setting core foundry to low-performance mode with this code snippit "game.settings.set('core', 'performanceMode', 'SETTINGS.PerformanceModeLow');"
The only real response I've received from Gameboard is "Foundry is working on optimizing it". This statement is true but is not specific in the slightest to Gameboard. This applies to ALL hardware. Foundry has been optimizing as they release each major version. Each version gets better performance. I am sure that the next version of Foundry will work better on the gameboard...just like it will on my 5-year-old surface. This does not resolve the underlying issue of the device hardware and Gameboard specific module.
The answers confirm a lot of my concerns and the summarized information I took away were:
As mentioned above if this post dissuades just one person from making the same mistake I did in buying this board I will count my community service as complete
If you'd like to know any additional info or "proof" of support interactions feel free to PM me!
So what I am getting from all this is to not bother looking at it for D&D until they can figure out issues.
$800 is a lot of money. But for its size and portability I would pay it if it was 100% what I need.
Yep that's summed it up very well - although I don't think the hardware can be "fixed" unless they overhaul their base equipment
There are a lot of other options (including Touch TV's) that are much better at this time if you are looking for a "stay in one spot" sort of setup
There are some interesting things 'Material Plane' is doing that I've been following for some time (no affiliation) and I may take a stab at one of the kits when it releases in the next few months
https://foundryvtt.com/packages/MaterialPlane
I have my fathers old all in one touch screen, 21" computer. I could possibly make that work
I use my father's outdated 21" touch screen all-in-one computer. I might be able to make that work.
basketball stars