A few months ago I began thinking about picking up a tablet that I could use at the game table to help speed up my GM'ing and gaming process. I hate having to use a full laptop. It's just too big most of the time and I honestly don't want my TTRPG gaming to be so digitally focused. An iPad is the obvious choice here, but I'm staring at computer screens all day at work and want to give my eyes a bit of a break at the table. So I bought a E-Ink tablet. I spent a few months researching the process and I ended up with a Boox Note Air C3, which is an Android based tablet. Since it is using Android, it allows me other install apps, which many of the other tablets like Remarkable don't allow.

So how has it worked out so far?  

The TLDR summary is It's good and I am using it for most of my gaming sessions, but it isn't perfect. It works better as a player notebook than a GM tool and your satisfaction will be largely dependent upon whether the app you are using is well optimized for the E-Ink screen. Super graphic heavy apps don't look great.

I also purchased the color, Air C3, version and in general I am "meh" on the color. I don't feel It really adds much to the experience and I find I have to have the front light on basically all the time. Battery life is decent but I will regularly go from 100% to 70% battery in a single 3-4 hour gaming session.

GM'ing

As a GM it is nice to have your PDF's open on the tablet and I like to take notes, and highlight right into the PDF. Split Screen view is handy, but can get a little small for searching. For example, when running Troubles in Otari for Pf2e, there was a situation where the monster in a combat scenario was in the back of the book. I opened the monster in split screen and while it worked, the screen real estate is tight.

While I take notes and prep right in the PDF's ahead of time, during play at the table I generally have another notebook open on the side for on the fly stuff. It's just too hard to jump back and forth between a notebook and PDF in game, the Boox is really just replacing my printing up the adventure.

Usability for PDF's largely comes down to how the PDF is formatted. I've found that the D&D and Pathfinder (high graphic content books) sorta "get in the way".  It really becomes apparent in PDF design with the D&D/PF2e styles that take up valuable real estate with the graphics and borders. The Boox does have a pretty good cropping tool though.

PDF's

Classic OSR content or Mothership, which is mostly black and white, really shines here on the Boox, and this comes down to the design. Scanned book pages do chug often times.

As a player, I having been using both apps, PDF's for player sheets. I'll touch base on the Apps below, but simple PDF's for player sheets work well. Generally what I do is either use a blank PDF and fill it in as I would with a pencil or use a generated PDF. I have had some wonkiness show up on sheets that use forms, so I try to avoid those generally.

Notes App

The note's app is really the star of the show and where I find the most utility as a player. Notebooks are great for note taking, especially for map creation. Being able to drag pages round is super nice, although I am a disc bound notebook user in paper and you can get that same feature there. Dungeon mapmaking while crawling is perhaps the most used feature. I've imported both an image as a background on a note and used just the grid sheets to draw out while we explore. My only critique here is that I wish we had scrolling pages for map making. 

Apps and Websites

Apps and websites are really hit/miss. D&D Beyond is almost unusable. The interface is only dark and just not optimized at all. You'll see ghosting constantly regardless of how I have the settings setup. A full refresh of the page lasts only until I scroll. This seems to be an issue with both the web and app version.

The Pathbuilder app is really solid. Looks good and generally performs very well. I do have to run almost all of the apps in Fast or UltraFast mode just for performance issues.

Demiplane is hit and miss. We played Daggerheart with it and it is very graphics heavy and all that graphic information just doesn't translate well to the screen. The built in NeoBrowser doesn't scroll and work properly in Demiplane. I'm currently using Firefox, but I don't love how it doesn't react well to a "full screen mode". There is always a header/menu bar.

The best app so far is Mothership, it part because it is so minimalist and black/white. You can see from the images how well it shows up on the screen. Really solid here and is emblematic of what works and what doesn't on the Boox.

Google Sheets, is "OK" and depends upon how complex the sheet is. We are using one for Good Society and it is landscape oriented and really not ideal for this screen setup.