Sensible Object
London studio Sensible Object has made piles of plastic animals a hightech affair, and its latest board game hybrid invites an AI to the table. Could androids really dream of electric meeples one day?
"ALEXA, PLAY A GAME WITH ME"
Words by Matt Jarvis
When In Rome: a travel trivia game with a virtual quizmaster
“It was important to us to be first.” Alex Fleetwood, CEO of Sensible Object, is speaking about the London-based studio’s latest board game. A travel trivia game that looks fairly conventional at first glance, When In Rome is anything but. For one, the person reading the questions isn’t a person at all; the quizmaster is Alexa, the artificial intelligence that inhabits Amazon’s series of smart home speakers.
Fleetwood and his team are no strangers to leading the way when it comes to combining the worlds of analogue gaming and digital innovation.The simple blocky plastic animals of their first game, Beasts of Balance, concealed electronic tags that saw the creatures burst into life on a connected tablet screen as they were stacked on a tech-packed plinth. Before that, Fleetwood ran Hide & Seek, an agency that created interactive events for clients including PlayStation and the Tate Modern that similarly blurred the “intersection of physical and digital play”.