One of the coolest aspects to owning the iPad is that companies are increasingly looking to it to recreate the board game experience digitally. The hardcore purists are probably up in arms at that statement, but really there are more than a few upsides to it. The digital versions are usually significantly cheaper, scoring and setup is handled for you, and my favorite is always having a willing opponent be it online or AI. While this is all good news though I don’t think it’s ready to replace the analog version quite yet.

As companies look to bridge the gap between digital and analog gaming things should get really interesting for consumers and gamers. Case in point is the Duo and it’s accompanying game Yoomi (You, Me) from Discovery Bay Games. It’s a two part system of both analog and digital components and does a good job of connecting the two. But let’s explain what Yoomi with Duo is.

The game Yoomi is a simple little quiz game where players try to guess what one person’s answer would be to different “this or that” questions. Things like “Would you rather ride rollercoasters or go camping?” or “Do you like Italian or Chinese food better?” These questions are always represented by two big icons on the bottom of the ipad, once for each choice. The player secretly makes their selection, then the other players guess by betting on which answer they think the chooser picked. Then scores are assessed and someone else takes a turn.

It’s the picking, betting and tallying that’s handled by the Duo. The Duo is a device that you battery up and sit on top of your iPad in a specific spot and syncs up with Yoomi. It has 2 holding areas on the top of it and a huge clear front so you can see what’s inside it. It also has a small camera that rests on the iPad screen so the two can interact.

When a question pops up the chooser reaches under the Duo to secretly make their selection so the other players can’t see. Once that’s done the other players put these colored chips on the side of the Duo that has the answer they agree with. So if you agree with the answer on the left you can place a few of your color chip in the left side of the Duo. Once everyone has made their bets you tap “Reveal Answer” on the iPad and the chooser’s answer is shown, and Duo rotates to dump the correctly answered bets into the bowl inside it. Whoever gets all their chips inside the Duo first wins!

As I said above the game itself is pretty basic, and can be had as a free download from the app store if you’d like to see it for yourself. Of course that being said it’s useless without the Duo on top of it, which definitely takes it from being a simple little game to something really unique. While the game isn’t going to blow the doors off anyone’s life it portends great thing for the future, and watching the Duo in action it’s hard not to get excited about where Discovery Bay Games takes the device from here. As a first salvo in the “let’s take the digital iPad and inject some Analog goodness into it” it’s a fantastic first step. I’m excited to see what Discovery Bay Games has up next in this line of thinking.

The Duo device will hopefully be supported in the future with new and interesting games,otherwise it’ll be a pretty big downer since it costs around $40 ($20 on Amazon right now). That’s a lot to spend if you can only use it for one game, but if we get some other types of games or more adult oriented trivia games (sports of some sort of trivial pursuit style thing) it could be worth the initial price of admission.