And here’s a list of “good” gateway games I found on BGG that values having no secret information: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/38507/revisiting-good-gateway-games

Ticket to Ride on Xbox Live allows players to play each other using the same screen. If I recall, there’s a button you hold to bring up your hand and ticket cards. I was a little surprised that Catan on Xbox Live didn’t support same screen play at all.

how important is it to have a game playable on an open board when the platform seems to be intended to be something that each player will have, rather than just one central unit?

For something that’s played on a personal device like a phone, it’s not an issue at all; you can combine private and public information on the same screen. There are plenty of peer-to-peer multiplayer games available on the iPhone already, although I haven’t tried any of them.

I’ve been thinking more about something like the iPad, and assuming that they won’t be as ubiquitous as a phone. The idea of iPad-based games is really interesting to me now, since you get the social advantages of table-top gaming but can add animation, sound, more complex score-keeping and status updating, and have a ton of games that you carry with you instead of requiring a room full of game boxes or keeping track of a billion little plastic tokens. If you get two or more people in a room all staring at their phones, it’s less social than if you’ve got everybody sharing the same device.

I haven’t really gotten into multiplayer gaming, even hotseat games, outside of Team Fortress 2, because it tends to feel like a single-player game where other people are crowding in on my space. But I like Game Night (when I can go), and love the idea of making social games that aren’t all split-screen shooters or beat-em-ups.

I note that Carcassone and Puerto Rico have been mentioned, I’ll add Power Grid (I think your bank account is technically secret in that game but it doesn’t make much difference). And Vino, though there is a momentarily secret aspect as you decide which areas to focus on. Modern German board game design leaves much out in the open, but I’ll also throw this thought out for consumption: how important is it to have a game playable on an open board when the platform seems to be intended to be something that each player will have, rather than just one central unit?

I like the idea of using the accelerometer to display different hands in different orientations, albeit one that would be reasonably easy to cheat.

I helped solve a puzzle on a Surface that used multiple colors of glasses to present different information to different players. Board games themselves have used colored lenses to hide information, so it is a possibly fitting tool, albeit one that restricts your color palette for the hidden information.

The geek in me thinks that there should even be some interesting cryptographic tools that could be applied… One simple obvious idea, each player inputs a secret number from 1 to 25 and the output gets Ceasar shifted with that number. If players don’t mind that little bit of mental alphabet math, it would be a reasonable way to keep each other honest. You could even throw in good old fashioned Decoder Wheels, to make the math a little easiers.

It wouldn’t have to be a big difference, but something that makes it worthwhile. Like playing Cluedo and after you choose what you think is the correct murder a little cutscene is acted out portraying it as you describe. And if you really want to play a game with hands, have each player take turns inscribing their personal symbol onto the touchpad. Then when they want to see their hand they hold the iPad so no one else can see the screen, “draw” their little symbol and their hand pops up.

It’s been a while since I’ve played dominoes; don’t you have a “hand” of tiles, like Scrabble?

Yes, you’re right; I guess I wasn’t properly awake when I wrote that.

One thing I thought of with a table, maybe if it is divided up into several segments or tiles, you could tilt up one of those (the one that contains your hand of cards) when you want to look at your hand. Then when you’re done with that, put it back into place, so it’s one flat surface again.

Man… when you watch The Jetsons, you can’t help but feel we’ve still got a long way to go, technology-wise…

Each player gets on ear Jack from the stereo and players get their info through audio.

That’s a cool idea. The original Xbox promised something like that when they introduced it with the headset; the API lets you send audio to individual controllers, so you could be sending different instructions to different players even at the same console. I don’t know of any games that really take advantage of that, though.

When thinking of more traditional games, chess, checkers and go, along with backgammon are all played “out in the open”. Yacht and dominoes as well.

It’s been a while since I’ve played dominoes; don’t you have a “hand” of tiles, like Scrabble? The idea of the iPad working as a portable chess, checkers, or go board where you don’t have to keep track or reset the pieces seems like a natural. I wouldn’t be surprised if a version of Battle Chess is already in the works, or something like the game they played in Star Wars.

You could always just put something in front of your virtual cards, but that would defeat the purpose of having a touch screen or table.

Yeah, you could even have a “peek” button that would reveal your hand/pieces/tiles/whatever, knowing that you have to obscure that part of the board with your hand whenever you pressed the button.

With the iPad, an idea that just occurred to me: you could take advantage of the accelerometers and detect when the thing gets picked up. So if you want to look at your cards, you just pick the device up. Assuming the two players are facing each other, it would detect whether it’s upside down or not to determine whose hand to show.