Ohm’s Quest is an electronic puzzle console inspired by escape rooms

techcrunch.com:

Ohm’s Quest is a steampunk-inspired cubical device that acts as a sort of escape game console. You can scan an NFC-enabled card on a side of the cube, and it starts a new story with interactive challenges that you should solve as a team.

While we don’t cover board games very often on TechCrunch, there was something fun about Ohm’s Quest when I talked with the team behind it. This project sits at the intersection of escape rooms, board games and tech creativity.

The team already launched pre-orders on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It raised €230,000 from more than a thousand backers and it expects to ship the game in early 2024. The starter kit currently costs $249.

“We design audio stories in which you are the hero. You play together with a team against the story. As a result, there are characters in the story who need your help to solve problems,” co-founder and CTO Allison Klopp told me.

And the interface with the game is these cubes pictured above. You get two cubes in the box and you can connect them with a cable — they communicate wirelessly but there are multiple slots that will be used differently depending on the story. On one side of the cube, there is a control panel with LED-enabled buttons and a directional joystick and a dial.

There’s a speaker to hear the story as well as a built-in accelerometer. On another side, there’s a tiny display that can be used to display messages or the time remaining before something dramatic happens.

Image Credits: Ohm's Quest

“As these interfaces come without any context, we add context with cardboard elements, such as cards, instruction manuals, game boards,” co-founder and CEO Etienne Pouget told me. Some cards have an NFC tag, which means that the cube can also receive some