Off the Grid: The analog analogues

Every other week Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.

Adaptation is an ugly word in the video game industry. Whether we're talking about film adaptations of our beloved franchises, or mediocre game adaptations of blockbuster movies, we as consumers grow reluctant whenever we see a familiar name in an unfamiliar format.

But adaptation doesn't always end in tears. With their strict attention to detail, many board game designers have successfully moved the best elements from novels and video games to the analog format. What follows are three examples of this transition, in no particular order. Let's get right to it.

Doom
In January of 2005, Fantasy Flight Games worked with designer Kevin Wilson to release a board game iteration of everyone's favorite first-person controversy magnet. Doom: The Board Game -- which apparently bears an uncanny resemblance to 1990's Space Hulk -- pits space marines against space demons, in any number of to-the-death scenarios ... in space.

The game board consists of a number of interlocking corridors, rooms, walls and doors. The board can be assembled to create one of the game's pre-designed scenarios, or customized to fit the specific desires of the players. In every scenario, up to three space marines must work their way through the labyrinthian Mars base, completing specific objectives while fighting off hordes of evil invaders. One player will always play as the invaders, who must work against the marines and attempt to foil their objectives.

The invader player acts as a "Dungeon Master" of sorts, building the board as the marines move through it, and placing monsters as he pleases. This adds a great deal of tension to the game, as the only way for the marines to complete their objective is to search for it. They have no way of knowing the layout of the station without exploring. For this reason, the game is considered imbalanced in favor of the invader player, although limiting the number of marines to two apparently solves this imbalance.

All told, Doom: The Board Game is a complicated affair, containing two separate rulebooks, six custom dice, and over 60 plastic miniatures. It uses all these pieces to invoke the same tense moments as its digital counterpart, however, and it's been said to do so quite successfully. Score one for the marines.


Lord of the Rings
In 2000, Fantasy Flight commissioned Reiner Knizia -- a renowned and utterly prolific German game designer -- to create a Lord of the Rings board game based on Tolkien's original novels. In an essay in Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Knizia discusses the pressures of adapting a much-beloved series. "Tolkien's powerful epic of more than a thousand pages is loved by millions," he writes. "This game would reach a large audience, but they would have high and very specific expectations ... Even though I couldn't cover the entire story line, my aim was to stay within the spirit of the book so that the players would experience something similar to the readers of the book."

The design Knizia ultimately decided on was one of cooperation rather than competition. Up to five players can play as the Hobbits, moving across Middle Earth to deposit the One Ring into the fires of Mordor, while avoiding corruption themselves. Because the game is full of dangerous perils, the Hobbits must work together in order to complete their task.

The game features a unique system of two boards, one detailing the Hobbit's progression through Middle Earth (and through the storyline), and the other depicting their slow corruption and distance from Sauron, who constantly seeks to disrupt them and take the ring for himself. Different events and scenarios push the Hobbits closer or further from Sauron on the corruption board, and any Hobbit who encounters Sauron is eliminated from the game. This ensures that the game becomes more intense as players approach Mordor.

The Lord of the Rings Board Game is widely considered to be a faithful adaptation of Tolkien's work, and an extremely enjoyable gameplay experience. Visually, the game is stunning, with cards and boards featuring the artwork of John Howe, a Tolkien illustrator who also worked as lead artist on Peter Jackson's film adaptations of the trilogy. Reiner Knizia still considers Lord of the Rings to be his most popular work, and the game has been published in 17 different languages worldwide.


Pac-Man (?)
What can I say about the Pac-Man board game? Well, very little, since I've never actually played it, or really even heard of it before starting research on this column. But you better believe that I'll be bidding for this thing on eBay.

X-Entertainment has written an amazing review of Pac-Man, but I'll go ahead and fill you all in on the basics. In 1982, Milton Bradley jumped on the growing arcade game phenomenon by releasing a startlingly accurate board game incarnation of Namco's little yellow money-maker. In the game, up to four players compete as different-colored Pac-Men, moving about the maze collecting pellets (or little white plastic marbles), in an attempt to be the Pac-Person with the most marbles at the end of the game.

During each turn, a player rolls dice to move his/her Pac-Man, and also to move one of two ghosts in an attempt to foil other players. Getting eaten by a ghost makes you surrender two of your marbles to the player who sicced the ghost on you, and also makes you start back at your default position. Four yellow power pellets are located on the board, and ingesting one of them allows you to eat ghosts for a set number of turns. For each ghost ingested, a player earns two pellets, thus making the circle of life complete.

According to X-Entertainment, the Pac-Men are a bit unwieldy in their construction, and the marbles in the game are easily lost (and even more easily knocked off the board while the game is in play). Still, Milton Bradley obviously wanted to keep the analog adaptation of Pac-Man as close to the source material as possible. The board is a faithful recreation of the classic Pac-Man maze -- the power pellets are where they're supposed to be, and even the wraparound teleportation is written into the game's rules. Sure, there are only two ghosts, and the Pac-Men all have sharp, pointy teeth, but at least they got the wraparound right.


There are plenty more analog adaptations out there in the wild, and we'd love to hear about them. Have a particularly horrific tale to tell of an adaptation that should never have been? Played the non-digital version of Q*Bert? Did you actually spend 80 bones on the World of Warcraft board game? Tell us about it in the comments!