The relationship between the world of cardboard-and-tokens physical games and their digital cousins has always been complicated. Though they’ve both grown exponentially in recent years, and each continues to influence the other, historically, there’s been a divide between the two industries that only the biggest names could surmount, like Monopoly and Scrabble.
But as board games enjoy an undisputed golden age — ranging from divisive, well-worn “classics” like Monopoly or Scrabble to elegant party games such as Codenames or Avalon — a few designers in both camps have begun to acknowledge the shared DNA of the biggest entertainment industry in the world and what is still regarded as a niche by many outsiders. Since the early 2010s, physical adaptations of blockbuster video games have become more common, with the likes of id Software’s iconic Doom receiving no less than two editions of a demon-blasting physical equivalent, and a 2017 board game based on From Software’s crumbled fantasy action-role-playing game Dark Souls.
From hell to cardboard
Though these big-name licenses ensure that these adaptations of video games garner a lot more eyeballs, they can present their own challenges. Just ask Jonathan Ying, the designer behind the second edition of Fantasy Flight’s Doom: The Board Game. In his mind, capturing the sheer kineticism of blasting a dozen imps with a rocket launcher in turn-based combat can be a lot harder than it seems. “On one hand, designing a licensed game can seem a lot easier than your own intellectual property, because you basically know what it looks and feels like,” Ying says. “I’m not going to make a Doom game that isn’t about killing demons with big guns, that’s what Doom has always been. On the other hand, capturing what is essentially a reflex-based, real-time experience can be really hard, especially with turn-based combat. That part is typically the most difficult of designing a licensed game.”
The Doom board game shares many mechanics in common with Star Wars: Imperial Assault, another highly successful 1-vs.-many strategy game from Fantasy Flight. (As with a lot of board games that put a premium on strategic combat, one player serves as the GM that controls the monsters, while the other players team up against them). Through the playtesting process, Ying and the rest of the team made several changes to better reflect the visceral, faintly ridiculous fiction of the Doom universe.
In the initial version, the marines were too fragile, falling to only a handful of smaller monsters, far from the “rip and tear” hyper-masculine power fantasy of the source material. Rather than the scrappy rebels of Imperial Assault, these marines needed to feel like horde-clearing action heroes. “It quickly became clear that we needed to boost the survivability of the marines, and to give the other side a lot more monsters,” Ying says, laughing. He also cites the inclusion of the 2016 Doom’s glory kill system, which enables the “Doom Slayer” to gratuitously disembowel a demon on the verge of death in order to gain back some much-needed health. According to Ying, this is a prime example of a brilliant video game mechanic that doesn’t translate well to the delicate action economy of a turn-based physical game. Eventually, Ying decided that if a monster took enough damage, a marine could remove them from the board by simply moving into their square, as in chess, which allows them to recover some health and draw an additional resource card. “It’s not quite as fun as ripping them apart in the game, but it’s the same basic idea,” Ying says.
Above: The Doom board game uses painted miniatures.
While Ying says that he enjoys adapting someone else’s property just as much as he likes designing his own concepts from scratch, there’s a hidden cost to most licenses: Like it or not, they date your work. Durable mega-franchises like Star Wars will always remain relevant to a core audience of fanatics, but the Doom board game was specifically tied to the release of the 2016 reboot, thus giving it a shorter shelf-life than many other games of its type. In Ying’s view, when most people go to pick up a board game from their local shop, they tend to pick from a list of fifty or so titles that have become canonical, with the rules-light Munchkin on one end and the great bulwark of Cold War simulator Twilight Struggle on the other. “Very few games that make it that far have licenses,” he says. “They have their own themes.”
Making homebrews
Of course, not every designer who sets out to adapt their favorite video game into a tabletop thriller has money on their mind; in fact, many fans adopt cult games for their own amusement, usually using the 20-sided dice rolling of Dungeons & Dragons as a base. While these projects are usually the work of dedicated hobbyists who rarely see a penny for their efforts, the actual quality of the products can sometimes approach a professional standard. With hit shows like Critical Role and Not Another D&D Podcast helping contribute to the raucous popularity of the 5th edition of D&D, it’s no surprise that creators are using the game as a launching pad for their own “homebrew” projects.
A ruleset known as “Darker Dungeons” is an exemplar of this form. Developed by a Redditor who gave only the handle “Giffyglyph,” the game takes many cues from the indie video game Darkest Dungeon, which replaces the pesky goblins and imposing owlbears of typical D&D with the cosmic horror and creeping madness of H.P. Lovecraft. Giffyglyph describes the game less as a direct adaptation of its digital namesake and more than a tabletop-ized take on its eldritch conceits. He became determined to write his own version of “5E” when he realized just how much the game had erased elements that he deemed central to the appeal of D&D, especially the possibility of character death, which is much lower in 5th edition than in previous incarnations of the role-playing game.
“There’s just this sense that the designers want to remove every element that they feel detracts from the experience,” he says. “There’s no more tracking food, water, or encumbrance, no diseases, no sort of ‘sanity’ system. They think those things get in the way, but I actually think they contribute so much to the feel of the game, the sense that what you are doing has consequences.” While he’s far from an old-school apologist, he gestures to earlier editions of the game for rules that are more grounded in reality, and are therefore more to his taste. For example, while “long resting” for 8 hours under the default rules in 5th edition restores all of a character’s “hit points,” a similar rest in an earlier edition of the game would restore only a tenth or less, depending on the quality of the lodgings.
By contrast, in Darker Dungeons, a character has to rest for an entire week in order to gain back all of their resources, a radical change that its creator describes as “vital.” Characters are far more likely to go insane or suffer career-ending injuries when faced with stout foes, and spells can backfire on an unlucky caster. While Giffyglyph presents the rules in a free PDF that has a superior layout and presentation to a number of professional RPG products, he says that he never plans to make a significant amount of money on it, even as he adds more products to his line-up, such as an “encounter builder” for fellow Game Masters. (He has a Patreon that some contribute to, but all his work remains free). “I don’t even know how to go about asking money for this sort of thing,” he says, laughing. “I want this stuff to be as good as possible, but overall, I mostly do it for fun.”
Adapting Scythe
Above: Scythe is a good example of an effective board game-to-digital adaptation.
Though creators like Giffyglyph are unlikely to receive significant compensation from their work, they enjoy one significant advantage: creative freedom. When it comes to the alchemy that enables the finicky rules of tabletop games to be enshrined in a digital adaptation, if the experience of Piotr Sobolewski is anything to go by, a certain mantra seems to hold: stick to the script. Sobolewski is the CEO of the Knights of Unity, a Polish developer that’s working on a computer version of Scythe, one of the most acclaimed “euro-style” board games of all time.
Initially, according to Sobolewski, the team had fairly ambitious plans for their take on the game, hoping to build it in 3D rather than the traditional two-dimensional approach of most board games on PC. However, they quickly realized that it would cut against the expectations of the game’s most dedicated fans, so they dialed it back. That meant throwing away six months of work. “Scythe is as complicated a game as you can find, so we talked to the original designer Jamey Stegmaier, and we decided that it wouldn’t add that much to the experience,” he says. “At the time, Scythe was the fifth most popular game on BoardGameGeek, so that’s a lot of fans who want a standard adaptation. Even though the digital platform gave us a lot more room for creativity, we figured out pretty quickly that any major changes would damage this really major IP, which clearly works really well. There’s always a party that owns the IP when it comes to games like this, and they have a very strong voice when it comes to even making the game 2D or 3D, for example.”
Sobolewski said that the two most difficult elements of the game to implement were both issues posed by the digital space. For one, getting the game’s “undo” feature to work proved extremely troublesome, forcing them to rewrite core aspects of the game in order to facilitate its proper function. For another, the game’s complex tutorial took far more work than they expected, owing in part to the massive rulebook that players are expected to internalize before they even pick up a token. “When you’re playing it on a tabletop, you have the massive rulebook under your elbow,” he says. “In a video game, you have to make it just as easy for them to find the right rule in the tutorial or in a guide. You have to think about it in a very different way.”
On the king’s path
Overall, acclaimed video game writer Chris Avellone (who contributed to Pathfinder: Kingmaker, the video game adaptation of the Pathfinder tabletop RPG adventure path) describes the difference between physical games and their digital cousins as largely one of specificity. While tabletop RPGs like D&D or Pathfinder focus on the fundamental task resolution systems that can apply to an incredibly broad set of possibly inputs — which allows for a great deal of improvisation on the part of both players and gamemasters — digital games require the developer to define all those systems down to the most minute details, which can bolster immersion while necessarily limiting the playspace. He uses the example of Wish, the most powerful spell in most editions of D&D and which bends reality to their will in dramatic and sometimes catastrophic fashion. Whereas the “gamemaster” might choose to adjudicate such a powerful spell in a wide variety of ways, using the vague spell description as a guide, Kingmaker has to set the rules hard and fast, removing the human factor that makes tabletop play so vibrant.
Above: The Doomspider will ruin your life.
The surge of digital-to-tabletop adaptations isn’t going to subside anytime soon. But while not every blockbuster video game will translate into a material masterpiece, it’s clear that the two mediums will continue to influence each other, whether the creators like it or not. There’s an argument to be made that 5th edition’s accessible, video game-esque vocabulary of short and long rests that Giffyglyph so dislikes has added to D&D’s explosion of popularity over the past few years, along with other factors, such as the rise of streaming platforms like Twitch. There’s a lot that they can learn from each other, but let’s just be happy that the days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons “THAC0” and literally typing out commands to roll dice on your PC are well-in-the-rearview at this point. Not even the crusty grognards liked that.
“While a tabletop gamemaster can simply say, ‘you arrive in the city,’ a digital gamemaster has to build every facet of the city, know the layout of all the gates, entrances, walls, streets and every corner of every alleyway, the schedule of every citizen the player sees, every guard’s weapon and armor and what provokes them to attack … it’s a lot of work,” Avellone says. “But that’s the strength of tabletop play.”
