Games

The world's most high-tech (and expensive) Scrabble board

The world's most high-tech (and expensive) Scrabble board
Mind Sports International has developed a £20,000 (about US$31,800) Scrabble board that uses RFID chips to detect each tile and transmit the data online
Mind Sports International has developed a £20,000 (about US$31,800) Scrabble board that uses RFID chips to detect each tile and transmit the data online
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Mind Sports International has developed a £20,000 (about US$31,800) Scrabble board that uses RFID chips to detect each tile and transmit the data online
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Mind Sports International has developed a £20,000 (about US$31,800) Scrabble board that uses RFID chips to detect each tile and transmit the data online
Aside from the addition of RFID chips, the new board also has a couple cosmetic upgrades in the form of LED lights that change color and a carbon fiber finish
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Aside from the addition of RFID chips, the new board also has a couple cosmetic upgrades in the form of LED lights that change color and a carbon fiber finish
Mind Sports International hopes the upgraded board will bring a little style to the traditional word game and resonate with viewers both at the tournament and online
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Mind Sports International hopes the upgraded board will bring a little style to the traditional word game and resonate with viewers both at the tournament and online
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With its basic game board and lettered tiles, Scrabble is about as low-tech of a game as you can get. But that hasn't stopped Mind Sports International from giving the game's iconic board a 21st century upgrade. For the company's upcoming festival in Prague, a new Scrabble board was built that uses RFID chips in each tile to detect where each letter is placed and transmit the data online almost instantly.

On the surface, the new board looks about the same as any other, but the raised platform houses some fairly sophisticated tracking technology. All 100 letter tiles contain a unique RFID tag, while nine circuit boards connected to 225 RFID antennas – one for each square on the board – monitor where each letter is placed.

The players' tile racks also contain RFID sensors, and scanning the play area for each tile takes about 974 milliseconds. Once the information is collected, some custom software translates it into a graphical display that pairs HD footage of each player with their score and stats. Aside from the addition of RFID chips, the new board also has a couple of cosmetic upgrades in the form of color-changing LED lights and a carbon fiber finish.

Aside from the addition of RFID chips, the new board also has a couple cosmetic upgrades in the form of LED lights that change color and a carbon fiber finish
Aside from the addition of RFID chips, the new board also has a couple cosmetic upgrades in the form of LED lights that change color and a carbon fiber finish

Mind Sports International hopes the upgraded board will bring a little style to the traditional word game and resonate with viewers both at the tournament and online. With the new graphics, Scrabble fans will now be able to instantly see what words and score each player has, while also guessing what the players' next moves will be.

Before you go rushing out to create your own RFID-enabled Scrabble board though, you should know that Mind Sports spent over £20,000 (about US$31,800) constructing the new board, along with months' worth of testing. Might be best to just stick with an old-fashioned pen and paper for keeping score at your home games.

MSI's high-tech Scrabble board will debut at the Prague Mind Sports Festival, which runs from December 1-4.

Source: Prague Mind Sports Festival

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4 comments
4 comments
ihateorange
"scanning the play area for each tile takes about 974 milliseconds"
So that's ABOUT a second then!
Clark Brooks
Ouch! All three of those "words" are illegal.
Paul Anthony
Great, now my nerd opponent can scan my tiles in my rack and know exactly what letters I have to play next. I love scrabble though, and I love this board, that was just tongue in cheek.
alex17pat
First, if you count world-wide, I’m not sure chess is the most respected. It might be go/weichi/baduk. Even in the western world, people who are expert in both games seem to think more highly of go. For instance, Edward Lasker said “go makes chess look like tiddly winks.”
It might be Xianqi (Chinese chess), which may also be more complex than chess.
Personally, I’d say go.
However, in the west, chess is played much more than go or xianqi. Chess is deeper than any other game that is commonly played in the west, although bridge is closer than most people think. https://wordmaker.info/how-many/scrabble.html