Is AI Taking Over D&D? Hasbro Partners With Xplored For “AI-Driven Game Mechanics” – UPDATED
AI is creeping into every corner of every industry, and a recent announcement from Hasbro has many wondering how AI is coming to D&D.
Promising “AI-driven mechanics” that will “enrich tabletop experiences” Hasbro announced a partnership with Xplored, developers of the Teburu, a digital board game platform. Teburu, if you’re unfamiliar, is all about “seamlessly integrating the physical and digital worlds, keeping players focused on the board” while the system takes care of the actual playing of the game. In 2019, it was handling Zombicide.
And Teburu itself is a blast from the past. We first encountered Teburu during the beforetimes at Gen Con in 2019. That’s back in the beforetimes. Owing to, you know, everything, the platform’s launch didn’t go as planned.
To the point where it’s only recently that the platform and games have started coming out. Most recently they had The Bad Karmas, and are currently working on crowdfunding a cooperative board game set in the World of Darkness with Vampire: the Masquerade – Milan Uprising, featured above.
Well only this past week, Xplored and Hasbro announced the partnership. Obviously, board games are going to be a big first step. But with the focus on “AI-driven mechanics” in the announcement, and a carefully evasive interview, many are wondering if Hasbro and WotC are looking to bring AI to D&D. And if so, how?
Hasbro Partners With Xplored – What AI-Driven Mechanics Will We See?
In a press release full of buzzwords about how the new technology will integrate and blend and empower “hybrid play” many seemed to catch a buried sentence that implies much more is coming:
“Hasbro and Xplored […] have reached a strategic partnership to transform board games through the integration of smart-sensing technology, and dynamic multimedia content. Under the terms of the agreement, Xplored will collaborate with Hasbro to develop a new tabletop platform that integrates digital and physical play for fans around the world.
As the global leader in tabletop games, we [Hasbro] envision a future where technology seamlessly integrates into analog gaming experiences and working with Xplored enables us to deliver innovative gameplay to our players and fans, limitless digital expansions to physical games, seamless onboarding, and powerful AI-driven game mechanics.”
Whether it’s seamless integration or seamless onboarding, the one thing Hasbro’s sure of is that whatever way you use Teburu and their new technologies, you won’t find any seams. You’ll barely even notice that you’re using it.
However, it’s the “AI-driven mechanics” that has the D&D community worried about what it might mean for Dungeons & Dragons. Especially with WotC pivoting to a digital-first model with D&D going forward; the new virtual tabletop and D&D Beyond are their biggest way into the future.
Books aren’t going anywhere, but the VTT and its digital marketplace are taking center stage–at least if Hasbro has any say in it, they are. Whether or not it will last is ultimately up to the players, who have proven able to make the billion-dollar industry giant blink before, but that’s a whole other story.
For now, an interview with Hasbro Gaming Senior Vice President Adam Biehl shed some evasive “clarity” on what that means:
Our approach here is to thoughtfully add multimedia content and digital capabilities to enrich storytelling, game mechanics, and player onboarding, while preserving what people value in board games, face to face interaction and the satisfying tactility of rolling dice and moving physical components. We plan to use AI and other software capabilities to create dynamic experiences that can instantly react to player decisions and rules resolution without the complexity of lengthy instructions.
And in the interview with GamesRadar, Biehl points out that Teburu is only the jumping-off point. Hasbro plans to go so much further. When asked about plans for long-running franchises, like D&D, Biehl responded:
We feel that the applications of this new technology will allow us to both enrich our current portfolio of games and expand our horizons to entirely new games – we can’t say much more than that for now, but we are very excited for the innovations to come
UPDATE: Hasbro Gaming reached out with a clarifying statement about the plans for the future with Teburu:
“We’re very excited about the partnership with Xplored, but want to clarify that this partnership is centered around future applications within board games and not the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game or its upcoming virtual tabletop.”
So it seems like D&D and the upcoming virtual tabletop won’t be using AI after all. At least not for the time being!
What do you think? Will Hasbro find a way to use AI to make D&D better? Or is this going to go the way of NFTs?
