BARCELONA—After trying out VR porn for the first time, the obvious next port of call was the other barb of the early-adopter pincer attack: VR games. At MWC in Barcelona there were myriad virtual reality gaming demos, from on-rails shooting games to full VR-and-HOTAS Elite: Dangerous setups and wacky HTC Vive stuff. But there was one game that really intrigued me, way out in the hinterlands of Hall 7: Lost Cities VR, the world's first VR board game.

Lost Cities, developed by Campfire Union, is a game for Gear VR that is based on a board game of the same name. The board game itself is fun, simple, and very popular. Both versions of the game are played in exactly the same way, except the board game allows for up to four players and the VR game only supports two (for now).

I won't go into the exact rules of the game, but it's pretty straightforward. Each player starts with a hand of cards (see image above). You take turns picking one card from your hand, strategically placing the card in one of five areas in front of you, and then picking up another card from a shared stack. When all the cards have been drawn, the game ends, the scores are tabulated, and one of you wins. It's one of those games that's incredibly simple to pick up, but a huge strategic game-space opens up once you play it a bit.

Mechanically, Lost Cities VR is fairly easy to play. You look at the card that you want to pick up, tap the control pad on the side of the Gear VR, then look at where you want to drop the card, and tap the pad again. You will repeat that process about two dozen times until the round ends.

I had two qualms. First, keeping your hand elevated by the side of your head for a long time is uncomfortable and will cause gorilla arm. Second, I initially couldn't find the stack of cards to draw from, because it was outside my field of view. The first point, according to the developers, is easily fixed with a hand-held gamepad or clicker; the second issue was something they were aware of but hadn't yet worked out a solution for.

Visually, Lost Cities VR was simple and quite low-res, but attractive enough. One advantage of the VR version of Lost Cities is that the "game world" can change between games. When I played there were two different zones—an Egyptian-style world, and another darker, moodier world that I didn't recognise—and the developers say there will be more worlds when the game eventually goes on sale this month.

In the Egyptian world I faced off against Anubis, god of the afterlife; in the other world, my opponent was some kind of horned beast called Gorak. For now, you can only play against computer-controlled opponents, but the developers are working on adding networked head-to-head play. In that mode, one of the Campfire Union developers told me, head =-tracking data will be transmitted to the opponent; you'll see which cards the other person keeps staring at.

Overall, I really enjoyed my time with Lost Cities VR. It wasn't that the game itself was particularly amazing, but in playing it I began to imagine a really exciting future for VR board games. Clearly there will be some difficulties in UX and UI design for VR games—how do you encourage someone to turn their head to look at something when the field of view is so narrow? And yes, a VR board game won't be quite the same as sitting around the dining room table with a bunch of friends. But with enough feedback (i.e., head movements, voice comms) and a polished interface, the experience could still be very immersive and enjoyable.

VR board gaming, as with other online games, could also be a huge boon for friends or partners who are too physically distant to play a real-life game. Or you could use VR to try out a board game, before you plunk down £30/$40 for it at the local game shop. Or, in a next-gen VR MMO, you might take a break from killing rats and hunting herbs and sit down in your virtual home to play a virtual board game with a virtual friend...

Lost Cities VR will hopefully be released in March, priced £8/$10, for Gear VR. The game is made in Unity engine, so it may be ported to other VR platforms later.