For all our adventures into the digital, there’s something undeniably perfect about a really tactile gaming experience. I remember having to spend almost an hour setting up complicated board games with three-dimensional pieces, and there is nothing more satisfying than watching a Jenga tower wobble and fall. And in a way, the Sifteo Cubes is a digital recreation of this older, more tactile gaming world.
The cubes are little touchscreens that can be manipulated and interact with each other in innumerable ways. Although you can expand a set of Sifteo Cubes, in classic gaming fashion, your first set comes with three cubes and a “base” that actually stores the games. You select which game to play by tilting a cube back and forth while game titles scroll across the screen.
In Chroma Splash, a simple puzzle game, you tilt all of your cubes to align matching orbs. You can do this in one individual cube, but two cubes will recognize each other and match sets of orbs between screens.
Shake a cube to roll dice in a game. Connecting puzzle pieces by bumping cubes together.
If digital is to be the future of gaming, then we can all lament the end of fun, physical games. But the Sifteo Cubes brings into the digital a great part of the past.
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