LAS VEGAS, CES 2012 – For Christmas, I bought my kids the immensely popular board game Settlers of Catan. We haven’t played it though, because no one can be bothered to learn the rules.
iPad versions of popular board games solve this problem, as I learned talking to the makers of Ticket To Ride.
“People love playing board games but hate learning them,” said Mark Kaufman, co-founder of Days of Wonder, which publishes Ticket To Ride. Last year, his company released iPhone and iPad versions of Ticket To Ride.
The iPad version takes care of the mechanics of the game — whose turn it is, score keeping, and following the rules.
But it also has a simple wizard, which allows novice players to dive right in without looking at the rules.
“People can play it without knowing any of the rules because the game makes you follow the game path,” Kaufman explained.
Kaufman said he used to love playing the game with his son, who has just left for college.
He still plays him online. “Somehow he manages to turn every game into a drinking game,” Kaufman said. “No difference with this.”
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
8 responses to “With iPad, You No Longer Have To Learn Board Game Rules [CES 2012]”
Please excuse me for typing this here, but WhatsApp is missing on the app store, it’s not there anymore! I’ve tried to contact you guys for several stories I had, but no one ever replies, so I thought I’d share that here.
So instead of teaching our kids to abide by the rules, we’re teaching them that it’s easy to follow the rules when: 1) You don’t know the rules, 2) You’re forced to follow them.
How very bureaucratic.
Yeah learning is dumb! Let’s give all of our arbitration over to the computer!
Please excuse me for typing this here…..nice try but I don’t think that’s going to wrk
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Wait…his presumably 18 year old son turns all games into a drinking game and that’s ok with him? Nice. Reading instructions and learning are actually valuable skills. This is depressing.
Flag herms1951 as SPAM.
You should learn the rules of Settlers. Best game I have ever played and a ton of fun for all ages….