Philips today announced that visitors of CES will be able to check out the "Entertaible", a tabletop gaming platform featuring a 30-inch touchscreen LCD screen. Using the Entertaible you can mix playing pieces with any kind of traditional board game programmed into the device. The initial plan is to get the device out to restaurants and casinos and such, but a consumer version might eventually follow.

"Entertaible offers the means to reinvigorate established board game classics," comments Gerard Hollemans of Philips Research in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, who leads the research team that developed Entertaible. "However, in the longer term, Entertaible could be used to invent brand new games offering unprecedented levels of user interaction -- games that would never become predictable or ever quite 'feel' the same twice, however often you played them."