Hands on with Board, the $700 video board game console aimed at PlayStation fans

The $700 tabletop console — a massive, polished 24-inch touchscreen designed to sit flat on a table — doesn’t fit neatly into any existing gaming product category. It isn’t a do-everything open-ecosystem PC competitor or a tightly walled-off novelty device. It can’t replace a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X as a AAA platform, and it’s hard to imagine how it ever could. Instead, the Board experience is built around touchscreen gaming that utilizes bespoke physical pieces and prioritizes face-to-face play. On a home consumer level, there wasn't much like it, which meant the first order of business for Putnam’s team of puzzlemakers and businessfolk was to imagine the possibilities.

That design choice is central to Board’s philosophy, even if it creates obvious challenges for scaling a platform.

“We experimented with generic pieces and what we found is it just didn’t feel as good,” said chief creative officer and head of games Seth Sivak. “It didn’t feel as good to use a triangle to cut as it did to use a knife. There’s something about that metaphor being that strong that really made the experience better.”

What makes a Board game

Before Board, Putnam founded Mirror, the smart fitness display she sold to Lululemon in 2021. According to Measel, the idea for Board grew out of Putnam’s own household: a multigenerational family where “family time” had gradually turned into everyone watching Netflix or scrolling on their phones in the same room.

The goal wasn’t to replace board games or reinvent video games, but to find a middle ground. After testing the demo device over several days, I’d call it a success. In Chop Chop, my family and I rushed to get out orders in Overcooked style, physically chopping vegetables with tiny knives, scrubbing countertops with sponges, and stirring pots with spoons. In Strata, designed by Studio Chyr, we stacked and rotated the Tetris blocks pieces to claim territory in ways that wouldn’t work as seamlessly in a physical board game or feel as devilishly competitive in a traditional video game.

“We were always asking, ‘Does this feel board-native? Could this game only exist on this device?’” Sivak said.

That question became especially important as the team iterated on early prototypes. Some ideas were shelved entirely. Others were radically reworked once the team realized that too much tapping or finger-based input made the games feel like oversized tablets instead of tactile experiences. Landing on the perfect blend of mechanics, then assigning them to unique playing pieces, became the workflow to perfecting any given Board game.

“We didn't want Wii waggle,” Sivak said. “That was the sort of example I'd always bring up to the team: In the worst part of the Wii hysteria, everyone was just using the gyroscope for everything. And so it became meaningless and people hated it. Instead, if you play Chop Chop, there’s a lot of touching and dragging and piece stuff — it's not like we don't use fingers, we use fingers when it makes sense — but a universal piece would have taken away some of that feeling of make-believe that's part of the physical meets digital magic of the device.”

One of Board’s biggest design challenges — and perhaps the team’s biggest hurdle — is trying to make games that work across generations. The company isn’t just targeting hardcore console players alone, or families with toddlers, or board game obsessives. They want Board to work for everyone when it needs to, knowing they could easily water down the experiences by making them broad. “Everyone wants to do the Pixar thing — fun for kids and adults — and not end up with Candy Land,” Sivak said.

The solution, in many cases, is role differentiation rather than difficulty scaling. In Chop Chop, my younger kid can take on simpler tasks — like placing a back-up chef on our soup burners — while our older players juggled more complex responsibilities like dishing out veggies and assembling sandwiches. Save the Bloogs, from Webcore Games, starts very simply, challenging players to build bridges and platforms as their little critters start marching toward spike pits, and with 100 levels, Silva promises there’s a difficulty tier for everyone (adjustable with sliders for Bloog speed and a pause button for stumped kids).

“That’s not cheating,” Sivak said when I mentioned assigning sponge duty to a younger player. “That’s exactly why we designed it that way.”

Several games also include easygoing free-play modes that strip away timers and scoring, letting kids simply experiment with the pieces and systems. I was happy to find a few games that I actually enjoyed sans children completely; after bedtime, with the right pour of wine, my wife and I spent a solid hour playing Omakase, the creation of 7 Wonders Duel gamemaker Bruno Cathala, and Cosmic Crush, an alien-themed battle to clear rows and score points that requires just enough strategy to avoid Candy Crush malaise. It's a bit of a cliché that rings true for Board: even among the 12 launch titles, there was something for everyone — and every attention span — in our early tests.

What $700 buys you with Board — now and in the future

A common knock against experimental hardware is novelty fatigue: It’s fun for a weekend, impressive at a party, and then quietly forgotten. So where does Board go from here, and how quickly?

“The 2025 challenge was: Are people excited about this idea at all?” Sivak said. “Now the 2026 challenge is how quickly we can get the game pipeline to a place where we’re giving people the right amount of ongoing things to play.”

Some games on Board are designed to be infinitely replayable thanks to rotating playspaces and healthy competition. Others are content-driven but built for expansion — it’s easy to see expansions to Save the Bloops and Chop Chop arriving through Wi-Fi-enabled updates down the road. Because the pieces are physical, brand-new games will be sold à la carte rather than through a subscription. Board isn’t committing to exact pricing yet, but the company envisions expansions landing closer to board game prices than $70 console releases.

Board plans to open the platform to outside developers, too. An SDK is already rolling out to an initial cohort, with broader access planned in 2026 — including the ability for users to sideload homebrew projects.

“We see this Founder Edition [the version currently for sale] as a dev kit too,” Measel said. “By seeding these sets of pieces now, we’re giving developers a place to launch from.”

None of that changes the elephant in the room: Board costs $700, more than a PS5 or Xbox Series X, and it exists in a world where phones already dominate casual play. (Although through Dec. 31, Board has discounted the unit to $500.) There’s room for competition; over Black Friday, the $200 Nex Playground, a subscription-based motion-tracker console with a fleet of mobile-skinned games aimed at kids, outsold Xbox.

Sivak doesn’t shy away from the comparisons, and believes the breadth of programming delivered with greater quality gives Board room to breakthrough.

“We do see ourselves as a console,” he said. “We’re shipping a console with 12 games, with hundreds of hours of play.”

He also frames the price in terms of what families already spend — multiple Switches, tablets, TVs, and $40 to $100 board games that require setup, teardown, and shelf space. Board has its own risks — we'll see how long I can go without scuffing up the (seemingly durable) screen and if future, more ambitious games encounter slowdown as they test the specs of this first unit — but there's obvious appeal in having the screen, the games, and the pieces in a single package. And by engineering games designed for in-person competition and co-op, to be played in physical space, over time it's easy to see it filling a gap that Sony and Microsoft and even Nintendo have largely abandoned.

“The biggest selling point of the new Mario Kart is a 24-player online mode,” Sivak said. “And I think it's just going away from what people wanted. There's a demand for this. There's a demand for togetherness, all in the same room.”

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The Founder Edition of Board is currently available for purchase. This review was conducted with a demo version of the Founder Edition of Board provided by Board. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.