No./ 8 The Shining can help your cabin fever
Five movie-based board games to stop you from getting bored — coming soon to a tabletop near you
QUESTS OF YORE: BARLEY’S EDITION
The Dungeons & Dragons-alike role-playing game which guided the guileless Barley (Chris Pratt) through Onward’s adventure is soon to be available as a real-life tabletop experience. One player takes the role of the ‘Quest Master’ who runs the show, the others become intrepid heroes heading off on their own jaunts in Pixar’s fantasy world of Clovendell. Seems aimed at younger players, but is attractively shot through with top Pixar production values in its miniature figures and components.
BACK TO THE FUTURE: DICE THROUGH TIME
With Biff buggering up the timeline, it’s up to two-to-four players to work together to travel to the past (and future) and tidy up his mess, grabbing scattered items and restoring order to Hill Valley’s chronology. All this is done through the rolling of custom dice, which determine which actions you can take, all the while requiring careful teamwork with your fellow Delorean passengers. THE SHINING
Coming from Prospero Hall, who brilliantly adapted Jaws into a game last year, this handsome cooperative game looks set to do for big hotels what Jaws did for not-big-enough boats. Players are snowed in at the Overlook, and must explore its rooms, mustering up the willpower to resist its malevolent influence.
Oh, did we say it was cooperative? Well, one player is actually secretly working against the rest, having already done a Jack Torrance. All play and no work...
TOP GUN STRATEGY GAME
First you pick a side: Team Maverick/goose, or Team Iceman/slider. Then you face off over an ’80s-flavoured hex landscape to pull off the best aerial manoeuvres and achieve target locks against each other. But that’s not all, as this is two games in one: between jet-fights you also have to compete in a show-offy volleyball-match card game that can give you the edge once you’re back up in the clouds. Bring the Danger Zone to your table, er, zone.
BILL & TED’S RIFF IN TIME
As with the Back To The Future game, players must work together to fix time. Except here, it’s down to Bill, Ted, Elizabeth and Joanna to ping around the board’s timelines in their phone-box time machine, picking up historical figures (Billy The Kid, Napoleon, So-crates) and getting them back to their correct period. The big draw here is the impressively detailed miniatures of all the characters, from the Wyld Stallyns themselves to Genghis Khan. Looks totally non-heinous.