Every place has stories that have never been turned into a game. A town before the railway arrived. A harbour during a storm. A school a hundred years ago. A city that exists only in someone’s imagination.
Tabletop roleplaying games have always been able to tell stories like these. Players sit around a map, roll dice and decide what their characters do next. The difficult part is everything that normally has to happen before the first roll: finding or drawing maps, preparing characters, learning rules and building an adventure for everyone else to play.
Doungim is a tabletop roleplaying games console developed by Realm Kinetics Ltd in the UK. Its main display lies flat on the table and becomes the game map. Players use real dice and real miniatures on top of it. Instead of spending hours preparing a setting, a player or Game Master can describe a place out loud and ask Doungim to build a playable world around it.
Describe a town as it might have looked in 1600, a lighthouse on a frozen coast or a station orbiting a dying star, and Doungim can assemble a map, characters and an adventure around that description. The aim is to make the world playable within minutes rather than turn preparation into a separate project of its own.
“The hard part of this hobby was never the imagination,” said A. Boush, co founder and CEO of Realm Kinetics Ltd. “It was the preparation and the rules. Doungim takes both off the table so a group can just sit down and play.”
The system is designed to respond during play as well. Players can ask rules questions out loud. Characters in the story can speak back in their own voices. A camera above the board reads physical dice rolls and can track the position of miniatures on the map.
That creates possibilities beyond a conventional fantasy campaign. A local history group could build an adventure around its own town. A museum could explore an interactive story tied to an exhibition. A teacher could use a historical setting as the basis for a collaborative roleplaying session. The same system can also be used for completely fictional worlds created at the table.
“Describe your own town in 1600 and you can walk into it and play,” the co founder said. “Every town, every school and every family has a story that nobody has turned into a game yet.”
Doungim can work in three ways: as an assistant to a Game Master who remains in control, as the Game Master for a group that does not have one, or as a solo game for one player. Groups can play around the same table, include remote players, or combine the two.
The computer, camera, microphone and speakers are built into the unit. Captions can appear on screen, text can be read aloud, and the pace and length of a session can be adjusted. The system is also designed to support play in more than one language.
Kickstarter
Doungim was funded in under three hours and is live now. View the Kickstarter campaign (opens in a new tab).
About Doungim
Doungim is a tabletop roleplaying games console developed by Realm Kinetics Ltd in the UK. Its main display lies flat on the table and shows a digital game world while players use physical dice and miniatures. The system can assist a human Game Master, run a group game, or run a solo adventure, with support for remote players.
