In recent years the trend to adapt video games into boardgames is just increasing.
Games like Stardew Valley, Civ, This war of mine and many more coming like Terraria or Call of Duty.
Some of these games like Civ are extremely complex games and I always wondered how well these translate into a boardgame. The production value of these games is often high, but I have my reservation that Stardew Valley the boardgame really captures the same “magic” as the video game did.
What are your thoughts on them? Any really good ones out there worthy checking out (lets exclude Dorfromantik here)?
Mixed. Deep Rock Galactic the board game is STELLAR and I love it. Slay the Spire did not translate well, too clunky. The monster hunter, resident evil, and Dark Souls games are absolutely awful, but that’s Steamforged Games’ fault, they are totally shit at making fun mechanics. I tried the Dead Cells game on TTS and its meh. We LOVE the Stardew Valley board game despite it drawing criticism. The new Call of Duty game on KS looks fucking awful- hidden movement in an FPS style game? What? And same with the Apex game, just no. So pretty hit or miss but I am always down to see if they are any good.
Hmm deep rock galactic, is this coop?
Yes! It’s pretty easy easy to learn and play too with enough missions and variability. The minis are super awesome too, working on painting them
Starcraft was an incredible adaptation. It stayed very true to the original, including all the game content, and it was simply a very good (but complex) game. Unfortunately Fantasy Flight lost the license very quickly and had to remake it as Forbidden Stars years later… and then lost the license quickly again.
The 2010 Civ game is also an excellent game with the expansions. Although the new one from 2017 with the Terra Incognita expansion seems to be liked even more, but I haven’t played it yet.
Civ the boardgame is… ok. It’s not great, it’s not terrible. There are other boardgames that do what it does much better. It feels very paint-by-numbers and mechanistic. The game is also very slow to play, with fiddly turns that have a lot of extraneous moving parts that need to be accounted for.
Edit: if you want a civ-style game that is a lot better and you don’t mind the sci-fi theming, I’d recommend Eclipse.
I recently tried the Witcher board game. Production value off the charts, but it really did feel like nobody actually play tested the thing. There were some glaring problems that should have been noticed after 5 minutes of play with somebody trying to win rather than just experience the game.
The fact that you can win relatively trivially by ignoring 75% of the core mechanics and just focusing on punching other players is pretty ridiculous. The quests feel absolutely useless, and sometimes actually punish you for daring to attempt to complete them. You need to houserule the crap out of that game to make it functional.
The slay the spire board game is a weird one for a different reason. They tried so hard to make it faithful to the computer game that the coop aspect of it feels tacked on and hollow. There’s very little interaction between players, and it just feels like you’re waiting for somebody at the table to bring their build online, at which point everyone else becomes irrelevant.
I generally like the trend, gives me something more to immerse myself in.
I’ve played This War of Mine, and it was a fantastic, faithful, soul crushing adaptation.
Recently got my friend the Binding of Isaac collection for his b-day and we both loved it! Surprisingly magic-like in mechanics but more Munchkin in setup. Like no deck building in that sense, but turn structure, stack and interrupts etc, comboing with items.
He sometimes commented on how they adapted specific items and was generally impressed in how thet made it work.
hmmm… Munchkin, at least in my personal opinion, is never a good argument, I find the game terrible.
Maybe I have to give This war of mine a shot at some point, I did enjoy the video game. How well does it play coop?
