Design Notes
By Senior Developer, Jeff Tidball
The critical thing about adapting a story — and a film boils down to a story — to a board game is usually not to make sure that when someone sits down to play it, that the gameplay spews out a replica of the story. That, frankly, would be stupid, if for no other reason than that a story flows along an immutable path, while a game has many possible outcomes and many routes to each.
The primary task when adapting a story to be a game is to distill the feel of the story and make sure that the game reflects it, while also fulfilling the separate and wholly different needs of games: to offer interesting turn-by-turn gameplay, to provide a level playing field for the players, and so on.
In adapting Paramount's Beowulf movie into a Fantasy Flight Beowulf board game, the situation was complicated further by the short production timeline dictated by the film's release date.
Upon acquiring the license, we quickly decided that the then-embryonic game would be best-served by an existing game engine. Although it wouldn't have been inconceivable to create a new game entirely from scratch, the playtesting process — a critical step to ensure a good and balanced game — would have had to be either truncated or skipped. The consequences of either could have been disastrous, and were not acceptable.
Kingdoms, a highly regarded board game for which designer Reiner Knizia already had ideas of improvement and expansion, seemed like an excellent candidate, and after a short period of discussion and consideration, we decided to use it as the basis for Beowulf: The Movie Board Game.
The next decision we faced was how to turn the story of Beowulf, the single protagonist, into something that could accommodate up to four players on equal footing. Solutions that involved one player taking Beowulf's role and other players taking the roles of other leading characters were quickly rejected. Who would want to play a Beowulf game and be relegated to controlling an also-ran character?
The meta-narrative solution that was eventually adopted presented itself early on: each player would arrange a full cast of character-figures (Beowulf, his Thanes, and other resources) in an abstract way, in relationship to other characters, villains, and elements of the story to be depicted on the game's tiles. The arrangement thus created would be understood as an alternate narrative arrangement of the story's basic building blocks. In addition to solving the one-against-many problem, this solution fit in well with the components and gameplay of the Kingdoms engine.
This approach is summarized at the beginning of the rulebook:
In Beowulf: The Movie Board Game, each player strives to tell the most epic version of the Beowulf saga. To this end, each player takes control of Beowulf himself, guiding the hero and his companions to recount the chronicle in the most exciting way possible.
The next hurdle was adapting the specifics of Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman's script. Diligent reading and many iterations of brainstorming and note-taking gave way to revisions after revision of the tile list, as well as the roster and rules of the game's new special abilities.
I also grappled with questions such as how to mechanically embody the themes of obsession and betrayal in mathematical gameplay, and how to represent the story's physical geography on very coarse grids. Two relatively subtle decisions made in this vein included the rough, cave-like edges of the act II board, which echo the cavernous home of Grendel's mother, and the choke-point on the act III board, intended to suggest the gorge and bridge that figure in the third act of the movie.
Speaking of caves and bridges, one additional factor in the design process was not knowing how much of the shooting script would eventually be reflected in the movie's final cut. Since the film was being edited at the same time we were designing the board game adaptation, it was literally impossible for us to know what the theatrical release would look like. As of this writing, no one at Fantasy Flight has yet seen it!
I enjoyed working on Beowulf: The Movie Board Game, and look forward to seeing it on store shelves and convention game tables in the weeks and (hopefully) years to come. If you see me at a con, or feel inclined to drop me an email, I'd love to hear what you think!
