Last week I published my review of Board, an unusual new games console that combines a massive 24″ touchscreen with physical playing pieces, and one of my key recommendations for the developers was to get a virtual tabletop for D&D and other TTRPGs onto the system as soon as possible. Now the team at Board has announced its lineup of new games and expansions for 2026, and lo and behold, a virtual tabletop system is right there on the list.
For those without the time to read my review, the Board is a very new and very odd piece of gaming hardware. Released in November in the USA, it’s a giant chunky tablet, like a smart TV lying flat on its back. As well as a regular touch interface, you can interact with it using physical playing pieces, which have conductive glyphs printed into their base that let the system identify them and track their movement and orientation. The overall effect is very social – a games console that multiple players interact with around a table, like a board game, not all looking up at a screen.
Putting a virtual tabletop onto this system feels like a complete no-brainer. There are already gamers who use projectors or smart TVs laid out flat to use the animated battlefields from Roll20 into their in-person D&D games. Enabling the browser versions of existing VTTs to run on Board would simply open up that option to anyone who has already the console.
But it seems like there’s more in the works than that, since the Board website says you’ll be able to “Use your own maps with Board’s piece tracking built in”. The team hasn’t specified how that will be realised or what it will allow, so what follows is my speculation. Board detects and identifies pieces by reading a unique conductive glyph in their base. So a pack of glyph-enhanced base converters that you could pop around the bases of your DnD minis would let you sync them up with the Board. That would then let the VTT react to the miniatures as you move them across it; for example, revealing the fog of war, spreading light around the characters, triggering traps, and so on.
While I’m sure that many smart nerds have suggested a Board VTT, I find it a lot more edifying to assume that the designers hurriedly added one to their 2026 plans after reading my review – and the only image of it above does look like it’s a preliminary concept sketch. I’ve contacted Board to ask for more information about the VTT, and for confirmation that I am, in fact, the source of this brilliant idea. I’m sure they’ll write back any day now.
If you’d like to learn more about my experiences with the Board – or have made your own custom VTT hardware – come and chat in the Wargamer Discord community. For a regular roundup of news and features from the team, make sure you sign up to the Wargamer newsletter.