Although the second installment in the Jumanji series, which comes out this week, deals with an enchanted video game that sucks a quartet of kids in for a thrilling adventure, real heads remember that the original 1995 movie had Robin Williams in the Nick Jonas role as a guy trapped inside a haunted board game. For a while, the movie industry was pursuing a lot of board game related projects, but only a few – Battleship and Ouija – ever made it to screens. That’s no reason to give up, though, so here are some ideas for board games that could actually make good flicks.
Betrayal at House on the Hill
Avalon Hill’s popular horror game would make an easy jump to the silver screen. In Betrayal at House on the Hill, players enter a mysterious abandoned house to investigate mysterious happenings, but – as you’d expect from the title – midway into the experience one of them snaps and sides with the evil forces against their former compatriots. It’s a great gimmick for a game and would work solidly as a horror film, with audiences left guessing about who the traitor could be. It’s the kind of thing we could see a director like Ti West having a lot of fun with.
Monopoly
There are few board games that are less fun to play than Monopoly, that arduous slog through property purchasing. It’s usually a foregone conclusion who’s going to win halfway through the game, and from there it’s just the gears of capitalism grinding the losers into bankruptcy before you can put the box away and never touch it again. But the fictional framework around the game is incredibly exciting – notoriously Mafia-riddled Atlantic City being bought up block by block by competing real estate developers that get each other thrown in jail and driven to ruin, just to own an entire town? That’s a prestige drama waiting to happen. Hell, with the right cast and script a Monopoly movie could be genuine Oscar bait. Ridley Scott actually tried to make this happen.
Stratego
Over a century old, Stratego is the precursor of modern wargaming. Two players each take over an army of various units, the identities of which are hidden from their opponent. That secret information is what has made the game an all-timer, as players need to weigh every action carefully. Could that move capture a powerful unit, or is the piece you’re about to take actually an immobile bomb that will wipe you out as well? Although the game’s trade dress sets it in the Napoleonic era, we think you could really make it work just about anywhere armies mass to determine supremacy.
Pandemic
One of the most popular new board games of the last few decades, Pandemic has a theme ripped from the headlines, as players cooperate to travel the globe attempting to stop the spread of multiple deadly diseases. It’s a plot ripped straight from the movies, as tiny mistakes can lead to cavalcades of disaster, with whole cities being overrun as the overwhelmed team of five specialists tries to balance their efforts. The fun thing about Pandemic is that it could be made along a whole range of budgets – it could work as a small-scale closed room drama or a world-spanning high-stakes adventure.
Guess Who
First manufactured by Milton Bradley in 1979, Guess Who? is definitely a second-tier game, not up there with the all-time classics but able to sell pretty decently year after year. If you haven’t played it, it’s a little like Battleship meets a police lineup. Your job is to identify the character that your opponent has picked by asking questions to weed out false matches on a grid of 24 suspects, using only yes or no questions. This seems like a solid premise for a murder mystery in our world of perpetual surveillance. Maybe a team of cops has to use footage from doorbell cameras, red lights, stray social media posts and the like to determine the identity of an international terrorist in a stadium full of people or something.
King Of Tokyo
Giant monster movies have been having a bit of a resurgence, so it’s possible that there’s room for one more. King Of Tokyo has quite a pedigree, having been created by Richard Garfield of Magic: The Gathering fame. Each player takes on the role of a huge kaiju that wants to cause as much damage as possible to Japan’s bustling metropolis. Each of them have their own motivations, but their ultimate goals are the same: wreak havoc and take out the other beasts. Sure, it’s not the most elevated of concepts, but sometimes it’s the old favorites that deliver the best.
Shadows Over Camelot
We’ve seen many movies about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, but none of them really seemed to capture the public’s imagination (and the less said about Warner Bros. attempt to launch an “Arthurian cinematic universe” with their 2017 flick the better). But maybe looking to a board game for inspiration will give the legends the jolt of relevance they need. In 2005’s Shadows Over Camelot, players control the Knights as they undertake a series of quests to bring peace to the kingdom, with one caveat: one of them may be a traitor working for dark forces to sabotage England from within. If that doesn’t get your gears turning we don’t know what will.
Settlers Of Catan
Blazing the trail for European-style strategy in the United States, Settlers of Catan doesn’t have much of a narrative behind it. But when has that stopped Hollywood before. The only real “character” in the game is the Robber, who works as a pawn of every kingdom to screw over other players and rob them of resources. We wouldn’t go that deep into the political intrigue – although a subplot about who can build the longest road might be fun – but instead keep things moving briskly in a sort of micro-Game of Thrones scenario set on a single island. There was some buzz about Sony pursuing a movie adaptation a few years ago, but it seems to have died down.
Space Hulk
The fictional universe of Games Workshop is one of the things that we’re flabbergasted hasn’t been exploited across more mediums. Maybe it’s just a little too hardcore for the normies, but we eat it up with a spoon. While the idea of a Warhammer movie might be a hard sell, something like Space Hulk is a no-brainer. Originally released in 1989, it’s a two-player combat experience where one side is a team of enhanced space marines tasked with investigating a derelict mass of spaceships and asteroids, while the other controls the swarm of Tyranids who have made it a home. Sure, it’s not the most original subject matter, but it’s fun.
Netrunner
Another Richard Garfield joint, this much-beloved card game has a cult following that persists long after the game went out of print. Set in a futuristic cyberpunk dystopia, it boasts some of the best worldbuilding ever done in a tabletop game, with each card injecting wit, intrigue and depth into the sprawling universe. We’ve seen films take on the archetype of a lone hacker trying to penetrate a network and retrieve vital information, but this is a fictional world that 99% of the heavy lifting has already been done on. And who knows, if it did well maybe it would convince WotC to bring the franchise back for a third try.
Twister
Okay, bear with us on this one, because it’s going to take a few steps to get where we want to go. Twister was introduced in the mid-60s by Milton Bradley and became a fad after actress Eva Gabor played it on the Tonight Show. Its rules couldn’t be simpler: put the designated body part on a circle of a specific color and don’t fall over. Here’s what we want to do with a movie adaptation, though: intense, practical-effects heavy body horror. Imagine a cursed, almost Uzumaki-esque version of Twister that literally tied people up in knots, wrapping them together into disgusting tangles of flesh, arms and legs jutting out at bizarre angles as the ball grows bigger and bigger. Sure, we doubt Milton Bradley would ever go for it, but with enough money anything is possible.
from Geek.com https://ift.tt/2tdPWfd
via IFTTT
0 comments:
Post a Comment