Jonah Stiennon's Wyldcard Makes Card Games More Interactive with Individual ePaper Displays

Maker and boardgamer Jonah Stiennon has developed a card game with a difference: each "card" is an independent ePaper display, allowing the contents to be updated as play demands — with internal memory allowing for stats and effects to travel with the cards, even between games.

"Based on an idea I had in 2014, built in my spare time over the past two years, I’ve finally completed my first physical prototypes," Stiennon writes of the project. "Wyldcards are small plastic cards with [ePaper] screens (like a Kindle). When placed onto a plinth, the image on the card can be changed by a hidden computer. The cards also contain a memory chip, so they can store stats, moves, and keep changes and status effects from one game to the next. Plug your plinth into your friend’s and play against them."

Each Wyldcard is an independent device, featuring local storage hidden behind a compact black-and-white ePaper display. When off the central control terminal, dubbed the Plinth, they are static — but when connected, their data can be read, compared to other cards, and updated, with the image displayed on the screen changing accordingly.

Stiennon has yet to publish technical details of the hardware behind the project, but imagery and commentary reveal the basics: the compact cards lack their own power or microcontroller, being made up of nothing more than an EEPROM memory chip and the display, and communicate with the Plinth via spring-fingers and contacts hidden on their undersides. The Plinth, in its current design, hosts a hand of up to four cards, with three tactile buttons next to each card allowing for manual control over status effects, combat, and the like. Unpopulated pin headers under each card terminal hint at future expansion capabilities, too.

Everything is controlled via a "hidden computer" within the Plinth, which can connect to other Plinths for multiplayer gaming — a Raspberry Pi single-board computer in the prototype, which Stiennon plans to swap out for a lower-cost STMicroelectronics STM32F7 microcontroller in the finished version. Magnets on the top help align the cards to the spring-fingers and hold them in place once installed.

"This has been my most ambitious project yet," Stiennon writes. "I learned how to design electronics and circuit boards. I learned a new programming language called Rust and wrote my first driver, I upped my CAD skills, 3D printed, and did my first resin casting. I generated the images pictured on the cards above using an AI image synthesizer which I’m hosting on my own server. I haven’t designed a game for them yet! I’ve got some ideas, and I’m curious to explore the new interactions and game mechanics these unlock."

"I think these cards have the potential to unlock a new paradigm of tabletop gaming," Stiennon claims. "They are rooted in the physical world, but can implement complex game mechanics run by a computer. Right now, each card costs me about $20 each, but with only a bit more scale, I think I can get that down to $10.

"My idea was to target $80 for a 'starter kit,' making it the equivalent purchase of a video game, [but] it would be about $300-$400 for three cards and a base in this iteration and at low volumes."

More details are available on the Wyldcard website.