Here’s a pretty solid rule of game design: any game you design in your dreams is likely to be crap. (That’s not to say you can’t get inspiration from dreams, but you’re unlikely to get a good game out of one you made up in a dream.)
A friend of mine brought this up recently related to a game he designed in a dream. I told him there was only one time I remembered doing that, and it was a role playing game, not a board game.
Of course, that night, I had a dream where I designed a game. Through a combination of that talk, and reading an article on Boardgamegeek talking about adapting the movie 300 into a board game, I invented the 300 card game in my dreams that night. And of course, it was crap. (It was about playing numbered cards on each other, and yelling “This is Sparta!” a lot.)
But it did get me thinking about adapting properties such as movies and video games into board games, and how to approach it. I’ll say up front here that I have never had a game published based on a licensed property, so you can take my advice with a grain of salt. These, as always, are based on design style and personal preferences. And as someone who does have access to a few licensed properties, it’s something I am going to be doing in the future.
There are really two paradigms when taking an established property and turning it into a boardgame. There’s the experience method, and the ambiance method.
The experience method is a more direct translation. You take what you feel the essence of the property is and try to recreate it using game mechanics. (This is like starting with a theme.) For a 300 game, for instance, I’d want the experience of either being 300 Spartans holding off a pass for a certain amount of time (using tactics and badassery) or the superior numbers of the Persians attempting to decimate the Spartans as quickly as possible using a variety of units. This would mostly be a war game, with the Spartans mostly having to make tough decisions on the fly and the Persians dealing with logistics and deciding what kind of unit to send in. (I don’t know if the actual published 300 board game does any of this or not.)
An ambiance game takes more elements of the story and world around it to construct a game (which is more similar to starting with mechanics.) In an ambiance game, you wouldn’t just have the combat. You’d take into account the political maneuvering happening in Sparta. You might have some more resource management type elements. An ambiance game is more abstracted in general than an experience game, to give a bigger picture to the story.
Lord of the Rings (board game) is something of a hybrid between the two. I place it stronger in the experience camp, since everyone plays a hobbit, and most of your actions have to do with what your hobbit is focusing on. However, a lot of the strategy is definitely “pulled back” and represented in mechanics that many view to be abstract: card management, iconography that has nothing to do with what’s going on, Gandalf having a few spells that you spend points on. Lord of the Rings is one of the best themed games I’ve ever played, since it constantly gives the impression of being a hobbit constantly on the verge of dying. But there are plenty of folks who just can’t get over the abstract elements (they’d probably rather see there be charts and die rolling.) So that’s something to be aware of too. You can look to War of the Ring to find a game that is in the ambiance style, but well themed.
The Starcraft boardgame is strongly in the ambiance style, and that has caused some contention with those looking forward to the game. Many seemed to want a game where you decide each turn what to build, how many workers should be mining vespene gas, how many should be mining crystals, and where each unit you’ve built should go. There are plenty of fans out there who wanted a game that gave them a micromanaging experience that the game gives them, but not in real-time and with the ability to see the entire board to make decisions. This is reasonable, but I like what FFG decided to do better. They made an ambiance game that uses the three races and their unique units, but where you’re not producing a single unit, or making the same kinds of decisions you do in the game. (They also made combat more interesting, which I’m all for- I’m glad they didn’t go for a cheap “roll dice to kill” mechanic.) I have not played the game yet- and I get the feeling it may be a little too wargamey for my tastes still- I’m glad they decided to take the property and try to design a good game around it, instead of letting the video game dictate how the game should play.
FFG also announced their plans to reprint the 1970’s classic Dune board game. The rub is that they weren’t able to negotiate for the rights to the Dune license (even though they tried) but were able to get the rights to the mechanics. A classic game, long out of print, with many asking for reprints for a while… it makes sense to get the game out there. So they’re going to reprint the game using their Twilight Imperium universe. Here we have an example of a book series successfully translated into a board game (that I’d say- without having played it- is more ambiance based) that needs to be rethemed. It’s a tricky situation for sure, but there’s some love for just the mechanics on their own. FFG has more talented designers than to just haphazardly put the TI theme over top the original game. The game will be tweaked to accommodate, and might just come out a better game for the experience. Dune lovers and those who are very attached to the old game may not like it, but at least a classic game is coming back in some fashion.
Now, there’s something you should not do if you want a good game, even though it’s the most common approach. You should NOT just take a property and slap it onto an existing game and hope for the best. (Adjusting some of the rules of the base game makes it a little better, but the world really does not need another version of Life.) Nor should you make a dumb roll and move that doesn’t resemble anything thematic AND doesn’t present any meaningful decisions. Many companies are just looking to make a quick buck by slapping a name on a product (as discussed a bit yesterday) but that’s a decision made by marketing guys- not by a game designer.
Game designs in dreams = bad. That being said, our college DM claims that the eventual climax of his multiple campaign villain, heroe, and god- based epic that started in college came to him in a dream so profound he shot up in bed and began planning the fable adventure. Still waiting on that adventure, but from talking to him about it I believe him that it will work. However, this is clearly more a case of inspiration and narrative rather than dreaming of a mechanic or whatnot…
Danc from Lost Garden just posted something about a game he’d thought of during a dream, looks like an intriguing idea but I wonder how well the “don’t make games from dreams” translates to the video game world also.
There’s a difference between taking a concept from a dream and using it (a tried and true method of any creative pursuit) and taking game mechanics directly from sleepy time.
Josh pointed me to this Game Spy series on properties that have gone from being video games to board games. Definitely worth checking out for more examples.