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)?

  • @[email protected]English
    5•1 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]OPMEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      I am with you, I think some games should just stay video games if there are a million things to account for each action you take.

      I have played hundreds of hours of Slay the Spire the Video Game but have very little interest playing it as a boardgame. Same goes for many of the games, I just don’t see how this can work very well. Exploration in Terraria vs exploration in the boardgame? Not sure about that, maybe I lack the imagination to see how this could be implemented well.