Dates: Friday March 1 (doors open at 6pm) through Sunday March 3

Location: Grasshopper’s studio at Collab, 304 Hudson Street, 6th floor

Intro: Brad Hargreaves, NY Gaming Meetup organizer

Come be part of Grasshopper NYC.

We are creating a game lounge with a stylish and contemporary vibe for the 21st century, focused on face-to-face play and local community. For a brief video introduction, click here; for a recent Gamasutra blog about the project, click here.

This game jam is for creating games for the Grasshopper Round Table, a circular — yes circular! — touchscreen table that seats 4 to 6 people and which aims to combine the best features of board games and videogames in a tabletop platform. The goal is to use technology to foster meaningful face-to-face play that’s appealing to a wide audience in an inviting social setting, not another screen-based experience. Check out a video of the table here.

All games created during this jam will be considered (if you want) for inclusion in Grasshopper’s initial games menu, which aims to be a curated showcase of some of the most creative and compelling contemporary game experiences around.

In addition, we’ll have some oddball prizes (including the chance to raid Ien’s personal board game collection with all your team members).

Doors open at 6pm on Friday, March 1 for TGIF drinks and mingling. At 7pm, we’ll get started with a brief presentation about Grasshopper and a demo of the Round Table and API you’ll be working with. We’ll help you form teams as needed. Continental breakfast will provided on Saturday and Sunday. Throughout the jam, we’ll have board game, open problem solving sessions, and playtests.

Important note on the API: if you develop with Unity, our native development tool, you’ll have the smoothest experience and be running on the Round Table in no time; otherwise you can use anything that runs on Windows 7, but you’ll have to do some lower-level tinkering to integrate with the table, including handling TUIO messages for input. (We do have some integration code for Flash which you are welcome to use, but it hasn’t been packaged into a neat API yet.)

Please bring your own hardware (apart from the Round Table!), including laptops for development and and iPads/tablets for quick testing for development.

For questions, please email Ien Cheng (ien@grasshoppernyc.com) or Kevin Porras (kevin@grasshoppernyc.com).