The project had been sitting in my "someday" pile for years. Modular 3D-printed board game tiles with embedded electronics: detect miniatures on specific squares, trigger addressable LEDs, play positional audio, run branching scenarios from a JavaScript engine on-device. Everything worked in theory. In practice: a nest of jumper wires held together by hot glue and wishful thinking.
https://scaniverse.com/scan/gnc4ush3y7ukgcvg
A few weeks ago I described the full schematic to Gemini and Claude, power rail, I²C chain, reed switch matrix, audio amp, LED drivers — and iterated the layout with them. I was skeptical. The boards came back from a Chinese fab clean, functional, and cheap. That changed everything. The thing that had been "someday" became "now."
Site : https://www.tiny-expeditions.com
Demo: https://demo.tiny-expeditions.com
Which is how I ended up seriously considering starting a company. The phygital board game market has a structural problem: hardware sold at cost, locked into a monthly app subscription. LEGO SmartPlay at CES 2026 proved the hardware appetite is real — nobody's cracked the open, affordable version yet.
Next on the technical list: swap reed switches for Hall effect sensors, deeper scenario tooling with markdown. But I'm not going down that road before I understand what people actually want to pay for.
Would love feedbacks ! What's unclear, what's underwhelming, what's missing? What would need to be in a Starter Kit for the price to make sense? 2 tiles? 4? With or without miniatures? STL is OK or Real Skin ?
At what price does it become a no-brainer vs. a "maybe someday"?
Brutal answers preferred.