Blok.Party raises $10M, will adapt Settlers of Catan to its blockchain game console

Published September 28, 2018

Blok.Party, the company that built the upcoming PlayTable game console, announced today it raised $10 million in new funding. It’s also unveiling a big content partnership, where Blok.Party will create its own version of the popular board game Settlers of Catan.

I first wrote about Blok.Party and PlayTable earlier this year, when co-founder and CEO Jimmy Chen first laid out his vision to use blockchain technology to build a console that can recognize real-world objects (like figurines and cards), creating a hybrid between tabletop and video gaming.

The idea may have sounded a little abstract at the time, but it got a lot clearer when Chen dropped by the TechCrunch New York office to play a couple rounds of Catan with me.

I’ll admit that I hadn’t played in a while, but it was clear from the start that PlayTable saved us some setup time — instead of putting all the pieces of the physical board together, you play on a digital representation of the board. Most of the pieces are digitized too, and we used and traded our cards using smartphones. But there is a physical “robber” piece, because Chen said this allows the robber’s movement to remain “a very visceral experience … that a digital version can’t ever capture.”

It may not be too long before you get to try this out for yourself, at least if you’re among the 10,000 pre-orders Blok.Party has received so far. Chen said the company will start shipping its first devices this fall.

He added that Catan, like many of the other games built for PlayTable, will be priced at around $20.

“For us, it’s not about trying to compete based on price,” Chen said. “We’re trying to compete based on experience.”

The new funding comes from crypto fund JRR Capital and other investors. Chen said the company will use the money to continue scaling the product, including further software development and building out the library of games.

At the same time, he emphasized that although Blok.Party is manufacturing the initial devices, his vision is to achieve real scale through partnerships with hardware manufacturers, who will build their own PlayTable consoles. Apparently, some of those discussions are already underway.

“Our strategy is to always have [our own] hardware program running to continually do research,” Chen said. “What I’ve discovered is that keeping a hardware program running is not that expensive. The expensive part is when you try to scale the program.”

PlayTable uses blockchain to connect video games and physical objects

Published March 14, 2018

I’ll be honest: When I first got the pitch for “the first blockchain-based video game console,” I assumed it must be some kind of gimmick.

But Jimmy Chen, co-founder and CEO of Blok.Party, said the Ethereum blockchain is “a critical part of this experience,” allowing his team to create “this seamless bridge between the digital and physical worlds.”

Today, Blok.Party is unveiling its PlayTable console, which combines elements of tabletop and console gaming.

This isn’t the first time someone’s tried to incorporate real-world objects into video games — for example, there was Disney Infinity, which shut down a couple of years ago. But by using blockchain technology, Chen said he can avoid many of the pitfalls that tripped up previous efforts.

For one thing, instead of manufacturing new toys and pieces for every game, PlayTable uses RFID tags, which can be attached to existing objects. So players can use the tags to incorporate their own toys and cards into the games.

“We’ve been trying to make toys smart for a very, very long time, but all we’ve been doing is stuffing resistors and transistors inside of them, making them incresingly more inaccessible,” Chen said. Blok.Party, in contrast, is “creating a data set that is inexpensive, that can easily attach to the physical object.”

He demonstrated PlayTable for me using Battlegrid, a card-based fantasy duel game developed by Blok.Party, which Chen described as “if Magic the Gathering, Hearthstone and Skylanders had a baby.” I won’t pretend that I followed all the ins and outs of the battle, but I saw that Chen could place different cards and pieces down and the table would recognize them and bring the related characters into play.

“The core of it, the physical manifestation of it that exists only in one space, has proven to be fairly difficult [in the past],” Chen added. “By creating that backend infrastructure, we can make the system a lot more successful. The element that blockchain really enables is this idea of having a truly unique, open dataset that people can contribute to and can build on top of.”

Chen said Blok.Party is working with third-party developers to create about 25 different titles, some of them based on classic games like poker and mah jong.

The PlayTable is currently available for pre-order at a discounted price of $349. (The company says the regular price will be $599.) The plan is to ship the console in the fourth quarter of this year.