I recently bought and now like the board game "Small World". It's like Risk with D&D characters, and no luck. But what's cooler is the iPad version, which looks great and let's me play head-to-head with friends or against the AI. Multiplayer board games on iPads will be cool and already are.
A new thought:
D&D/RPG gameplay is fun and should be more ubiquitous. It's social and creative and the world needs more of both. Friends could get together to play D&D, "Twilight", "James Bond", or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".
But the rpg rulebooks are complicated and painful to use.
As a social-RPG game platform, imagine a pair of iPads: one for the "storyteller"/DM, and one for the group of players (who huddle around it). All maps, combats, status updates, would appear on the screen. The DM has a "privileged" view of the world (showing where traps, monsters, etc are).
Make a platform that can run any ruleset (eg Warhammer or Buffy, or D&D or whatever). Get people playing real "social games" again.
Update (2/8/2011):
Turns out this idea has occurred to many others. See discussions here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=873148 and here: http://critical-hits.com/2010/04/22/how-the-ipad-changes-dd/.
It could be a problem that Infogrames has the electronic rights to D&D through 2015, but perhaps the "Open Game License" from Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro would provide enough of a starting point (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/oglfaq/20040123e).
This would be a labor of love in any case. D&D is for geeks like me.
