Enhancing collaboration in tabletop board game

Abstract

Through combination of tabletop and mobile phones, we introduce a mechanism containing private, public and group workspaces for computer-mediated tabletop board game. It can sustain the important sociality between players while ensuring privacy and enhancing visual effect. Based on the popular board game Monopoly, we design Copoly on a multi-touch tabletop and mobile phones where players can form groups to collaborate. A qualitative and quantitative user study was conducted to explore the pattern of collaboration and its effect on tabletop game experience. The results indicated that social bonding did play an important role on the frequency and pattern of collaboration in tabletop games, and players gained a more joyful experience through competition and collaboration.