Nordbeam games
Games for the table.
Party and board games for iPhone and iPad. Play in person, one phone each, or online with friends.
- Free to play
- No ads, no tracking
- One phone each, or online
- In five languages
The games
One account for all of them: your name and your friends come with you from game to game.
Manifesto
Most of a good game is who you play it with.
Every home has a shelf of games: a deck of cards, a cup of dice, a board with a piece or two missing. One person bought the box, and the whole table played. Nobody paid to sit down, nothing interrupted a turn to sell you something, and the rules were the same for whoever held the dice.
On phones, games learned to make their money from each player instead. Watch an ad to continue. Wait four hours, or pay. Your friend has to buy it too. Buy gems to win. A game built that way is playing you, and it’s a strange thing to bring to a table of friends.
What makes a game good was never inside the box. It’s the people around it: the bluff that almost worked, the friend who always calls too early, the rematch nobody planned. So we make our games for the table, and we sell them the way the box on the shelf works: everyone plays, and the extras are for whoever wants more.
Six games, one account, one pass. These are the rules we hold them to.
Your friends play free.
Every way to play is free in every game, online and in person. A friend who follows your invite never meets a paywall and never has to buy anything to sit down with you.
One box, the whole table plays.
When a table shares a game, the host’s purchase covers every seat. In Odd One Out, a host with the Tabletop Pass deals from all 40 places for everyone, online or across the room.
Pay for more, never to play a friend.
The pass adds depth: every past Daily, the toughest bot, the question that would have won it sooner. One pass covers six games, or buy one game’s extras once and keep them. It never buys an edge over the person across the table.
No tricks at the till.
A paywall shows up when you tap something locked, or once after a good moment. Never mid-game, never after a loss, and one tap closes it. The free week says when it ends, and we remind you two days before it does.
No ads, no tracking.
Nothing interrupts a turn to sell you something, and nothing follows you out of the game. What we count to make the games better is anonymous.
Look down to play, look up to bluff.
In person, everyone plays on their own phone at the same table, with no internet needed. Hold to peek at your card, check under your cup, then look up: the faces around you are half the game.
Fair, and nobody sees your hand.
Online, the rules run on our server, and each phone only learns what its player may see. In Salvo and Safecrack the second player always gets a last turn, so a game can end in a draw.
Friendly to whoever sits down.
No chat with strangers, just a few emotes, and report and block are one tap away. A bot always says it’s a bot. Losing is gentle: a soft note, and a rematch.
A minute to learn, the same for everyone.
Every game teaches itself in a minute, in five languages. Five of them have a Daily, the same for everyone, every day, so the whole table can compare. And one account carries your name and your friends from game to game.
That’s the whole rulebook. Your move. — Nordbeam
Where this comes from
- Andrew K. Przybylski & Netta Weinstein, “Can You Connect with Me Now?”, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2013 A phone merely lying on the table made a meaningful conversation feel less close and less trusting.
- Ryan J. Dwyer, Kostadin Kushlev & Elizabeth W. Dunn, “Smartphone Use Undermines Enjoyment of Face-to-Face Social Interactions”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2018 Friends who kept their phones out at a meal enjoyed it less and felt more distracted.
- Daniel L. King et al., “Unfair Play? Video Games as Exploitative Monetized Services”, Computers in Human Behavior, 2019 Patents for in-game purchase systems describe tracking how people play to tune offers and prices so they keep spending.
- US Federal Trade Commission, Epic Games (Fortnite) settlement, December 2022 $245 million in refunds for purchases a confusing interface tricked players into, and a ban on voice and text chat being on by default for children and teens.
Also from Nordbeam
Tabletop Pass
One pass, six games
Every way to play is free, and friends who join your table never pay. The optional Tabletop Pass unlocks the extras in all six games at once.
What the pass adds