It's possible to make your own pieces with a multi-material 3d printer (our early prototypes have been made with Bambu X1C & H2D printers), though it's pretty finicky to do so, and requires some rather expensive filament. Happy to help anyone along though!
This was my immediate thought. I have a Bamboo X1C; buying special conductive filament is fine if you're just making a few pieces.
Board is MUCH more interesting to me if I can easily program it for my own games, especially if I can share them with others. I'm thinking about TTRPGs and other army building games where each piece has unique capabilities and rules.
It would be nice if I could buy smart bases, kind of like RFID stickers. Something I can glue to the base of an existing miniature with a 10-20mm round/square/hex base.
With those tools, I would build deep accounting assistance for complex games. If it's cheap, you could put custom terrain pieces on the Board with smart properties (hard cover, soft cover, blocks line of sight, etc).
Obviously there are lots of partnership opportunities there. You could get the table top game publishers to publish Board editions of their games that automatically keep up to date with the latest rules.
If that all works, the obvious next limitation would be board size. a 24" screen can do a lot, but many games would benefit from a screen measured in feet. That would be expensive and hard to move around though, given the current thickness.
Perhaps an intermediate solution would be support for tiling Boards. Everyone brings their own, you shove them together and have a much larger playing surface. Bezel width would be annoying here.
i imagine the special filament might only be needed for a layer or two (assuming the board contact surface is the top or the bottom that is)?
It might be easier to 3d print normally, then separately 2d print the capacitative layer, then stick it on the bottom of the 3d printed piece: https://youtu.be/ON-6bdhQHpI