My favorite board game app is Forteller. It provides voiceovers for the story text of a game. As I refer jokingly in the title, that saves me from having to read the text in a solo game. But in a game with multiple players, it also saves somebody from having to read the text aloud. Plus, professional voice actors are unsurprisingly much better at reading text aloud and making it sound good than the average board game player. For the Dark Quarter it isn't yet completely clear to what degree we will get voiceover of the story, in Destinies unfortunately only a relatively small part of the text had voiceover. Forteller recently sent me a mail in which they announced an upcoming announcement. Bleh! But fortunately they spoiled it by putting an image in that mail which is the cover image of the upcoming Sleeping Gods - Distant Skies. Oh, wow, I hope they do the original Sleeping Gods too, because that already brilliant game would be even better with voiceovers, there is so much text to read.

Using an app to voice-act the story has another big advantage: As long as you still get a book as well, the app is completely optional. Thus if for some reason the app is being discontinued, you would still be able to play the game. That is one of the points where apps in board games get controversial: If you *need* the app to play, then you need to worry about the perennity of the app. On the other hand, if the text is only in the app, and not printed in a book, the production cost of the game can be lower. For Dark Quarters I went for the €59 basic pledge, which isn't too bad a price for a game with a handful of miniatures these days.

While I am not that worried about perennity, it does bother me that in Destinies the app is used to hide information from players. Like when you have to do a skill check, the app doesn't tell you how many successes you need on your roll; you can only enter the number of successes into the app and then see whether you succeeded or failed. The Destinies app is also used to scan QR codes on item cards, which allows for a "use crowbar with door" kind of point-and-click adventure game gameplay. Which can be fun sometimes, but on other occasions it gets really annoying when you never realized that you should have used your credit card on that door, while for some reason the crowbar does nothing.

Hybrid games between board games and apps are becoming more frequent. The Teburu "smart boardgame" system wasn't exactly a hit. So it seems as if developers still have to work out which parts of a board game would benefit from app support. I guess there will be interesting things to come!