Designing Biofeedback Board Games: The Impact of Heart Rate on Player Experience

Biofeedback provides a unique opportunity to intensify tabletop gameplay. It permits new play styles through digital integration while keeping the tactile appeal of physical components. However, integrating biofeedback systems, like heart rate (HR), into game design needs to be better understood in the literature and still needs to be explored in practice. To bridge this gap, we employed a Research through Design (RtD) approach. This included (1) gathering insights from enthusiast board game designers (n = 10), (2) conducting two participatory design workshops (n = 20), (3) prototyping game mechanics with experts (n = 5), and (4) developing the game prototype artifact One Pulse: Treasure Hunter’s. We identify practical design implementation for incorporating biofeedback, particularly related to heart rate, into tabletop games. Thus, we contribute to the field by presenting design trade-offs for incorporating HR into board games, offering valuable insights for HCI researchers and game designers.