Heart Transplant

Today I want to talk to you about board game adaptations of other popular media. Tabletop gaming is a powerful tool, it can create fascinating universes and allow the players to weave their own story within that space. And since tabletop gaming has such variety of mechanics, it has a natural advantage over other forms of media for adaptations. Unfortunately, a lot of big publishing companies have taken this advantage as license to slap any well known copyrighted story on some random game to make a quick cash grab. This is unfortunate for everyone involved, especially the fans of that story who are cheated into thinking the board game will provide them a familiar experience to the story they already love.

Complaints aside though, I want to start with some good, something we as designers should aspire to and study so we can learn how to make it right. This game is not only the best board game adaptation, but probably one of the best board game made of all time - Battlestar Galatica. We can talk a lot about Battlestar Galatica, but for today let's just focus on why it is a good adaptation.

Warning: light spoilers ahead.


The key of adaptation is like a heart transplant. You find the main conflict of your original story, and then you create an environment that can recreate the conflict for your players.

BSG certainly achieves this on the surface. Players take control of characters they are already familiar with on the show. Players strive for the same goals - reaching Earth if you are human and sabotaging the voyage if you are a Cylon. Players also face the same difficulties/opportunities, shortage of fuel, food or population all are losing conditions for the humans. Externally the humans are facing seemingly insurmountable Cylon fleets and they have to make some tough choices just to escape. By aligning its goals and mechanics with the TV show, BSG not only created a familiar world for the fans, it also reduced the learning curve as the fans will feel intuitive about how situations should be dealt.

The heart of the BSG show is the tension between humans and sleeper Cylons. The BSG portrays this well through the hidden loyalty mechanic and give Cylons plenty of chance to secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) to sabotage the humans. The result of all this is that the players feel immersed in the universe of Battlestar Galatica. Players begin to think and act like the characters of the show - throwing wild accusations around, trusting the people they should not, etc. Players are not intentionally doing this to role play, but because the game is gently guiding them to do so. As a true test to the level of immersion, players can try re-imagine their gaming experience as an episode in the show, it wouldn't at all be out of place.

Keep in mind the three elements below that makes BSG a good adaptation, with the third being the hardest to implement but also the most important:

1. Alignment of goals (mechanics)
2. Environmental Immersion (thematic integration of mechanics)
3. Recreating the key conflict (player dynamics)

In the future, we will contrast BSG with some unsuccessful adaptations by evaluating them using the three elements above as metrics. Hope you guys will find it interesting!