Pinball Racing is a multimedia handmade board game. It offers an innovative form of gameplay. The pace of the game is fast and the feedback from the game is rich, multidimensional and instant. The creative way of customizing the game makes Pinball Racing suitable for people of all age groups.

Pinball Racing is an innovative board game, with the purpose of bringing a disruptive game-play experience through novel interactions and an expansible, entertaining design. Traditional board games are more likely to be card games, or simple physical, non-electronic games. These traditional forms of play do not boast immediate, rewarding feedback, which is one of the most significant traits of any electrical or digital game. A game that includes DIY and customizable components offers even more fun, and is suitable for audience spanning a wider age group, because of the variety in difficulty and themes that can be achieved. Pinball Racing is exactly this kind of DIY electric board game — an electric maze game, to be exact, and it is created with multiple age groups and settings in mind, offering fascinating gameplay in all these scenarios. Powered by Arduino hardware and custom program, it combines the physicality of a building toy with the multi-media presentation of a video game. Players can build their own maze with the variety of pieces that come with the game. Then, each challenger guides a metal ball from start to finish by tilting and moving the entire maze, aiming to navigate the maze in the shortest time. The player must explore the fastest (or the most fun) route, and at the same time avoid dangerous “penalty zones”. In a single-player setting, one can challenge a previous best score, while in multiplayer settings, whoever takes the shortest time wins, and players can take the challenge to the next level by coming up with harder mazes for others to beat. Why | Creating an innovative board game The mission behind Pinball Racing is simple: to boost the ability of board games by offering instant rewards, and to challenge the traditional view of board games. Board games have always been a multiplayer form of entertainment, and I preserved — leveraged — this trait, to add one more dimension to the competitiveness of the game, introducing the “wildest maze design” competition on top of a traditional racing game. Approach | Customized board game, creatively done I spent a lot of time on prototyping and user testing for this game. DIY maze is the most important characterization for Pinball Racing. After many iterations for a maze design, I decided that the player should have control over the difficulty and setup of the game, instead of being stuck with a consistent, stale design. With this degree of freedom, the players no longer only focus on “the best way to beat the level”, but also on “how to make the game more interesting”. That is a whole new dimension of fun. Expansion | Infinite potential for derivative creations Pinball Racing features a fun, unique experience, but not exclusive builds. It is created from common materials that makers use every day, and it also uses a very simple connection to hold the maze pieces. This design makes it possible to create new maze pieces easily, and even create an entire set of pieces on different themes. The flat platform and large amount of insertion points also make it possible to fit more electric parts, something an enthusiast can build on their own. In this way, there are infinite combinations and possibilities to create unique Pinball Racing mazes. Technology | Multimedia immersive game experience The main reason behind using multimedia technology and electrical components in Pinball Racing is that traditional board games do not offer the kind of immediate feedback that video games offer, and that those feedbacks are mostly based on 2D visuals. I want to bridge that gap, and use electrical components to make that feedback more real-time and richer. The laser gate (built with a laser and a photodiode) allows live timing, which adds to the liveness of the game, and the two sets of laser gates hidden as “traps” increase the difficulty, both of which increase the pace of the game. This more rapidly-paced game enables the player to understand and get right into the game faster, lowering the bar for players. The highly visible timing screen and the buzzer (which plays a simple, retro-style tone depending on the state of the game — idle, playing, finished, etc) make the game experience more holistic and immersive.