A few weeks ago I described the full schematic to Gemini and Claude — power rail, I²C chain, reed switch matrix, audio amp, LED drivers — and iterated the layout with them. I was skeptical. The boards came back from a Chinese fab clean, functional, and cheap. That changed everything. The thing that had been "someday" became "now."

Which is how I ended up seriously considering starting a company. The phygital board game market has a structural problem: hardware sold at cost, locked into a monthly app subscription. LEGO SmartPlay at CES 2026 proved the hardware appetite is real — nobody's cracked the open, affordable version yet.

Site + Demo:
https://www.tiny-expeditions.com/

Next on the technical list: swap reed switches for Hall effect sensors, deeper scenario tooling. But I'm not going down that road before I understand what people actually want to pay for.

Would love feedbacks ! What's unclear, what's underwhelming, what's missing?