Board Games Brought Into A Digital Age
Hello! My name is Peony and this is my company, Lemonpeach. I founded this tastily named company with a friend of mine, Rick, and employed the help of my partner, Caryl, and Rick’s friend, Jordan. Together, we created the beginning of Lemonpeach.
But what’s Lemonpeach? And what do we do? And why does it sound so tasty?
We’re a product company of designers, developers, geeks, gamers, and passionate individuals of our crafts (we also love food). Our love for creating and gaming led to our first project called Game Night, a community based app to help board gamers connect with each other.
You might even say we’re gamifying the board game experience more than it already is, and combining elements we love from the community — building video games into board games, which is a naturally social hobby — a hobby that’s prided in being separated from gaming in digital formats.
With the rise of self agency in digital products — think Kickstarter, Uber, and Air BnB — it’s surprising that board gaming has not received a similar treatment. Days when board game nights were restricted to family occasions are long gone. The internet and ability to connect with anyone from anywhere around the world who shares your interests is an amazing feat we should all not take for granted. And it’s about time that the board gaming hobby is brought up to speed.
With Game Night, we knew we wanted to create something that we could find use in on a daily basis. We’re young, tech savvy, love games and want to find and connect with others just like us. Sure, there’s Meetup, but it’s too generalized. How can I find people with similar game tastes as me? Can I make sure that “Board Game Night At The Pub” isn’t just drinks with Monopoly? And how can I make sure I know what to expect when I get there? These were issues we all had when we attended Meetups in Toronto. We had a lot of hits and misses. We even ran our own events at my first co-founded company, Quiche Games, in order to run game nights the way we wanted to. We had great turnouts and I’ll be forever grateful to those who gave us a chance to come play and see what we were about. Despite that there has always been an itching problem in the back of my mind — to break the status quo on board games.
An initial ideation of Game Night was to be a game stat tracker where you could record your scores on games and be able to compare them and know what your best and average scores were. I know there’s other tracking apps out there but over time, our goal became different. The bottom line of the decision of creating Game Night was to connect people with others who have similar interests in games. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a recurring Werewolf group? Or play Twilight Imperium every month with a great group that knows its ins and outs, and is willing to sit the full 12 hours to finish the game with you? Or what about knowing if someone will take forever to take their turn, and knowing **not** to play that complex three hour game with them. That’s where we want to get to.
Data is truly beautiful, but data is at its best when it’s applied and filtered in an applicable way for us to use. There’s just no excuse now that we have the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It’s time to bring something modern to boardgaming. Something digital to bring us together, connect, and provide us with filtered data among all the noise we read and hear around us.
I know that we have a long way to go, I know that we’re not there yet but we’re also testing as we go and building a product that we want to use, and altering it to the needs of our gaming community as we continue to use it to organize our public board game nights.
If you’re interested in helping us out or want to contribute in some way, let us know. One of our philosophies is to always be open to hearing feedback and receiving help from the community we serve.
