Mom’s Choice Awards is excited to announce another post in our interview series where we chat with the inventors, designers, publishers, and others behind some of our favorite family-friendly products.

As we continue our ongoing interview series, we bring to you a one-on-one we had with Nir Kessler, the founder and owner of Akibabus Ltd, which brings us the Award-winning game Boxitale™ Knights of Nature. We are excited to share some more details about this engaging and innovative game!

MCA: Hi Nir! We are excited to be chatting with you today. Why don’t you tell us about yourself and your company.

Nir: I am the company founder and owner. I am an Engineer Game designer, story teller, game board hobbyist, dreamer and entrepreneur. I was previously an industrial engineer in the locking solution business. I served as Vice President of Operations and Vice President of Sales for a Global organization.

Akibabus Ltd is a game publishing company with a unique and interactive gaming concept that re-defines creative craft gaming. The company started as an Israeli startup 2 years ago, with an agenda to take the modern ‘tech game’ opportunities and combine them with traditional gaming of building, crafting and real-life challenge solving.

MCA: Can you share a little bit about your product and how it works? 

Nir: Boxitale™ is a unique gaming concept of playing a story that is streamed on the phone and solved on the board using various craft techniques and a lot of imagination. The Boxitale™ stories lead players into original, animated adventures where they are the heroes, building, designing and solving the challenges presented to them in the story as they try to save the day. Once the player’s design is ready on the board, they take a picture of it and upload it using the Boxitale™ app; the picture is reflected in the story.

MCA: What makes Boxitale™ Knights of Nature different from other apps or games on the market?

Nir: Boxitale™ is the perfect app- board game combination. We use high quality content and advanced applications to give kids an experience they’ve never had before. Boxitale™ is a game that becomes your own adventure – you are part of the team that participates in the adventure. You use your phone to see the story and take pictures of what you do – you will see that in the story itself as it evolves.

MCA: So fun! Boxitale™ introduces a new concept in the gaming world to consumers: playing the playable story. Can you tell me more about that?

Nir: Boxitale™ is a new experience. We say ‘Play the Story’ and that’s exactly what it is. It’s a playable story that kids become part of. It’s not just a game. It’s a story driven integration between a board game and an app. Kids become invested in the stories. They are able to continue the story and then they can integrate what they done while playing the game into the story and take it further. It’s all driven by their imaginations and there are no wrong answers. Every time you play it’s different. The game keeps providing new episodes you can play!

MCA: So how can consumers use your devices to help enhance craft gaming? 

The devices give us amazing opportunities to make the game experience much more vivid and to challenge the young generation in their favorite space. We understand that some parents want to reduce screen time – our goal is to make screen time more effective by integrating the
experience into a board game for a much more holistic and immersive game experience.

MCA: That sounds great. Congratulations on Akibabus’ success! What is next?

Akibabus is a publisher of different types of board games. Boxitale™ is the first. Making playable stories has endless possibilities and we plan to keep making them for kids and adults.

Thanks to Nir for taking the time to chat with us! You can visit the Akibabus website here.