Welcome to Pick Up and Deliver, the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder as

I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk home.

I'm Brendan Riley.

Well, good afternoon listeners.

It's a lovely day here in suburban Chicago.

The temperature is in the high 70s.

So I've taken off my sweater.

I'm just wearing a t-shirt.

I'm going to follow that walk home and I want to talk to you about board games.

I teach a class called Board Games and Literature in which we explore how board games tell stories

and talk about storytelling in different literary forms and how board games can operate

as a literary form and how they generate different story elements and so on.

It's a fun class and we have a good time playing different games and exploring different

things that happen in the stories and so on.

Today was the last day of the semester so it was nice to hear from the students what

worked and what didn't work.

There was a fair amount of interesting conversation about what we're doing and what's going

on and generally I enjoyed myself.

One of the projects that I have the students do is imagine an adaptation of a story into

a board game.

Now this semester I had a problem where I did not specify that it could not be a story

from a game.

It had to be a story from a linear narrative medium like a book or a film or a television

show because I want them to think about how to adapt the story into game elements and if

you're adapting a game it's already in, it's already being told with game elements so

that part doesn't work.

But that's a note for future versions of this class.

But I wanted to talk today about the idea of adapting stories into board games and where

I've seen success and where I've seen things come up short as we think about how those

adaptations work.

So one of the things I asked my students to think about which is the same approach I would

take where I'd given a property and asked to adapt it is to first identify the key elements

from that story that make that story unique or interesting or compelling for the audience.

Because I think that the board game adaptations that are successful in adapting a story from

one medium to another, the trans-mediated adaptations to use Paul Booth language from game

play are the ways that the designer captures the feeling of the story in the play of the

game.

So an interesting challenge and I think there are two ways that designers approach the task.

One way is to adapt the experience of the story such that you get to live the story.

The advantage of that is that it buys entirely very strongly into the nostalgia and the pleasure

that people have of that story.

If you are a fan of a story and when you play the game you get to act out the story, that's

really fun.

Very engaging really fits kind of what you want when you go to play a game that's based

on a story.

At the same time there is very little room for surprise.

If you're adapting a story then you know what happens and the evolution of the story beats

are limited because it's not fun to visit your favorite story and have it end wrong.

I will use an example here, two versions of this kind of adaptation, one, a couple that

I think work well and then one that doesn't.

I will say the two that I think work well but within limits are the jaws board game and

the goonies never say die.

Both jaws and goonies never say die capture the feeling of the source movies with jaws.

The feeling the movie is in two parts right the first half is the shark hunting people in

amity and the decision being made by the town about how to hunt the shark and then the second

half is a battle between the shark and the people on the boat.

This is perfectly captured in the game.

The first half of the game the shark is playing a hidden movement game where it's moving around

trying to eat people and the players are trying to find the shark and hunt it enough that

they can then move on to the second half of the battle.

Unlike the movie of course the shark can win and that's part of what makes the game interesting

is the shark could win or the shark might not win.

And unlike the but like the movie they capture a lot of the feeling of it.

The graphic design in the game draws on the graphic design from the movie.

They use the same font they use for the credits in the movie to do the font design of the cards

and other things in the game.

The game takes the movie takes place in the 70s and a lot of the style of the game the

visual style matches 1970s aesthetics.

Of course the second half of the game where the humans in the shark are battling.

It captures that idea of the humans are doing everything they can to fight the shark

but the shark seems preternaturally or almost supernaturally powerful and their odds of defeating

it continue to go down as the shark challenges them in various ways.

It's a really good adaptation of what happens in the movie and the book but it also leaves

room open for the shark to win it leaves tension there in a way that the movie had tension.

Although I think anybody watching it knows the shark isn't going to win at the end but

in the game the shark could.

So that's a really good example of taking these precise elements from the movie that make

the movie enjoyable to watch that represent the sort of key elements of the story and bringing

them into the story of the game.

I will point to another adaptation that I think doesn't succeed that well and this is

back to the future and adventure in time.

Pretty sure I have the subtitle right there.

Back to the future and adventure in time is by a pair of designers that I really like.

Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback.

It was a really interesting multi-use card game that has the theme of the back to the

future story but very quickly loses the essence of the story in favor of the interesting

game mechanisms.

They are really interesting game mechanisms.

In back to the future and adventure in time you are moving back and forth between 1955

1985 and 2015 and in those jumps you are playing different cards that give you different,

they're solving different problems or puzzles and if you succeed in solving the right ones

then you get some points and you're trying to complete a group of different problems

that will sort of solve the time paradox that is at the heart of particularly the second

movie I think.

Although I'm trying to remember if you get to go back to 1855 or not or if it's just

55/85/85/2015.

It might be 1885/55/2015.

You might not go to the 1980s as I think about it.

But either way, at the heart of the game is not telling the story of back to the future.

It's playing this really interesting and frankly well designed multi-use card puzzle game

with the back to the future theme on it.

And I think that's why ultimately a lot of the reviews of the game were not very good

because what people wanted was something like what happens in jaws.

I will say though the game that comes closest to that as far as I'm concerned is the back

to the future game made by FUNCO that's not the dice game.

So there's three back to the future games that I'm aware of.

The dice game is a pretty close adaptation of the back to the future story.

You're trying to complete the story beats through various cooperative mechanisms while

trying to keep BIF at bay.

It works pretty well but it doesn't really capture that feeling the way that I would say

jaws does.

So that is one approach to adapting a story is having the players engage with the story

itself and try to replicate it in various ways.

And again this is this can succeed well and can miss sometimes.

You can also do this where you're adapting a game story but kind of filing the serial numbers

off.

A good example of this would be the Slasher movie game last Friday in which you're basically

playing Friday the 13th of the game in which you're basically playing Friday the 13th

of the game.

And in that one players are one player is the Mask Killer, it's Jason.

And the other players are the camp counselors.

And the whole thing is during the day games played in four phases.

During the day the Mask Killer is dangerous and during the night the Mask Killer is dangerous

and the camp counselors are not.

And during the day the camp counselors are hunting the Mask Killer.

So there's this back and forth that works pretty well.

But there is another approach to adapting a story into board game form.

And this is to take the setting of the story and make a board game from it without necessarily

adapting the story itself.

A couple examples of this that I would point to, there's the Red Rising board game.

There is the recently released not Stormlight Archive, the Brandon Sanderson one about eating

metal and doing magic for some reason not remembering the name of right now.

And there's the Jeff Kengelstein's The Expans board game which is a card-driven game in the

style of Twilight's struggle but it takes place in the Expans universe.

And then there is Game of Thrones the board game.

In each of these the world of the story is constructed as an environment in which to play

a game that evokes the kinds of events that the stories enact but doesn't lock players

into reenacting the narrative of those stories.

And I think that engaging with this kind of world building adaptation is an interesting

follow up to the kinds of storytelling that are done in the direct adaptation.

I think usually these are better adaptations if people are interested in the world building

of the worlds they're exploring.

For example a Game of Thrones works really well because the world building of the different

families and the different characters fits the kind of game that you're playing, the

area control troops on a map game.

But you aren't locked into the individual story arc of the Rise and Fall of House Baratheon

and the Rise and Fall of House Stark and the way that those particular plot elements

play out in the novels or the TV show Game of Thrones.

Instead the setup works really well.

It captures those feelings of allegiance to story but then allows for players to sort

of think through or play out the different possibilities within the storyline.

I would say games that do that well are games that set up that world really well.

I think the Expans is one that didn't work so well for me but it might just be how well

do you know the world?

Like I thought the Expans was an interesting game but the events were less compelling to

me maybe than some of the things that happen in the other world building story type situations.

And then another approach or another one that works I think really well is what you'd

call the story with the serial numbers filed off.

You're telling a story that's very similar to the kinds of stories being told in these

bigger narratives but without the specific narratives.

A great example would be a touch of evil which I often describe to people as Johnny Depp's

Sleepy Hollow game movie as a board game.

Or another example would be Obsession which is kind of like playing Pride and Prejudice

as a board game.

It evokes the story, the type of story that's told in these narratives but without the direct

licensing.

And again I think how well this works depends on how good a job the designers do of building

the world that people are playing in.

Now I will fully point to the fact that Paul Booth and a number of other game scholars

have explored this territory before.

I'm kind of walking the same path they did but I think it's interesting to think through

it yourself and kind of echo the kinds of knowledge that other people have explored

when you're thinking through how these ideas function.

I will put some links to other people who have written about this sort of thing in the

show notes but hopefully you found a meditation on this concept interesting and I'd love to

hear your thoughts on it.

You can share those thoughts over on board game geek and guild 3269 where I'd be happy to

hear them.

You can reach out to me on board game geek.

Wombat 929 is my username there.

I'd love to hear from you.

You can also send me a direct mail message by email to the email address branded in AdWrattlebox

games.

Well thanks for joining me on my walk today.

I hope your next walk is as follows in this line walk.

Bye bye.

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