this project was created quite a long time ago !
The origin of this prototype is a game of the gooseboard game. It's a famous multiplayer board game in France, where the players advance with a dice along cases and try to reach the end, with special "bonus/malus" cases. My son designed one as a drawing, with special rules for each case and I wanted to do an electronic-enhanced version of it for him.

I didn't want it to be screen-based - it's not a video game-, so most of the interactions were to be audio-based, multiplayer. I decided to record my voice and say what each of the players has to do, say the dice result ... The toy should also be autonomous, so I decided against needing an external amplifier, and simple 1.2V batteries were needed, preferably two of them (we'll see that powering a speaker under those conditions isn't easy (for me at least)- without boosting it with an "expensive" extra IC).


The final result is a functioning board game running on batteries, but also a nice basis on which to make cheap talking toys. See homepage for full details