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One of the defining features of a blockbuster is the set pieces: Indiana Jones outrunning a boulder, Luke Skywalker’s death star run, John McClane abseiling with a fire-hose. If a big summer movie doesn’t have at least one iconic, nail-chewing moment of suspense, then you can bet the studio’s books will be looking red come tax year-end.
But can these moments be sufficiently captured in board game feel? Here are five games I think pull it off. But please note, these aren't necessary the best board games based on films. There are plenty of excellent games that are linked to famous franchises, such as Dune Imperium or War of the Ring, but those are games that use the source material to tell their own stories, to create their own drama. I’m interested in games that mechanically put you right in the moment, give you the chance to re-enact those “wow” moments you saw on screen.
1) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Massacre suitably eviscerated the horror film standards of the time and established a lot of tropes that have stuck around: the slasher, the masked maniac and the ‘final girl’ (that last trope even having a whole series of games dedicated to it in the Final Girl series). What many often forget is what set it apart: its creepy rural setting and the thoroughly unwholesomeness of the place and the people. If you watch it now you’d probably be surprised how much gore there isn’t.
Prospero Hall seem to understand this. Everything about this game just seems greasy as soon as you open the box, from the sweaty leering faces of the sawyer family on their character sheets, to the screaming, uncomfortably-close faces of the heroes on theirs. Even the item cards are housed in a cardboard blood-stained fridge. All the components are just ick.
The game itself is suitability one vs all: one player takes the role of the Sawyer family whilst up to three others play hapless victims trying to escape. The survivors’ objective depends on the set up, it could be finding the car keys and escaping, to burning the house down, but the Sawyer family’s is always the same: rip & tear.
The “family” player has a lot of nasty tricks up their sleeve. Once they’ve earned enough fear tokens, they can spend them on the hero’s turns to unexpectedly jump through windows or sprint down a corridor, anything to trip up the hero’s plans and keep them on the defensive. As the game goes on, the family become more enraged, culminating with Leatherface bursting out of the slaughterhouse to pursue the heroes with a chainsaw that can kill with one swipe. As the rulebook itself says: there are no winners - only survivors.
2) Jaws
What better game to have on this list than one based on the film that defined the summer blockbuster in the first place. Jaws’ runaway success in 1975 changed how studios approach film releases and set the model for summer releases that is still being followed today.
The film itself can be boiled down to two acts. The first is sheriff Brody trying to untangle the mystery of swimmers disappearing or turning up mangled, whilst battling the petty bureaucracy of a tourism-fixated city council. Act Two is him and his two pals taking the shark on directly in a increasingly desperate battle-of wills. The Prospero Hall (they keep cropping up) adaptation captures this elegantly.
Jaws is a another one vs all game, primarily using Hidden Movement. In Act One, the Jaws player writes down on a shielded little notebook all the evil things he plans to do, then announces to the 1-3 human players which swimmers he’s noshed on and where, as well as if triggered any pesky motion sensors, though he doesn’t have to be straight about in what order all this happened. Then Aunt, Brody and Hopper (all with their own unique powers) have to work backwards and try to figure out where the shark went and where he’s going, throw out some more motion sensors, close beaches, pull swimmers out of the sea and use special powers to try to narrow down the shark’s location. This carries on till either the humans have pinned down the beast or the beast has had its fill of swimmers: the more swimmers chowed on, the more powerful Jaws is in the next part.
In Act Two, things get flipped around. Literally! The board is turned over to reveal the fishing boat, The Orca, and now the human players themselves are in danger of getting munched on. Jaws can pop up on any side of the boat, doing heavy damage to it and anyone unfortunate to be standing there. The humans have to try to predict this and be waiting with pistols and clubs. This cat & mouse is winner takes all and can produce some nail-biting finales. In our most recent game (pictured), the last surviving player swam to the last piece of wreckage and thrust a spear, killing ol’ Dolls-eyes at the last possible moment. Roy Schneider would be proud.
3) Alien
In space no-one can hear you shuffle.
What started out as a schlocky ‘creature feature’ (the film that was at one point called “STARBEAST” ) was bent into shape by perfectionist Ridley Scott and elevated past its B-movie trappings with the artistic direction of H.R Giger to become the seminal sci-fi horror classic ‘Alien’.
In the first fully cooperative on the list ‘Alien: Fate of the Nostromo’, Ravensburger attempts to recapture the clammy isolation and fear of an unknowable foe in tight quarters.
1-5 players are running about the maze-lie, Nostromo, trying to complete randomly drawn objectives whilst being stalked by the xenomorprh. The objectives mostly revolve around pick-up-and-deliver but you also need to use this time to gear up on flame-throwers, cattle-prods and motion trackers.
Once these are done you reveal the randomly chosen ‘final mission’ which ranges from trying to bait the Alien into the airlock then blowing that son-of-a-bitch into space, to getting everyone off the ship before the self-destruct activates. One even has the psychopathic android, Ash, roaming the halls and handing out heavy damage.
The Alien has its very own threat deck with some simple instructions on how he activates, plus a subtle filtering system that makes the deck more dangerous as the game goes on. This little acid-filled rascal can really sneak up on you, scurrying along hallways or bursting out of vents, doing damage to the shared morale and forcing the player to run screaming in the opposite direction (often away from their objective).
Alien, much like the film, is all about ratcheting up the tension and it does this well by always reminding you you’re running out of time: the steady loss of morale, the barely-sufficient flamethrower fuel and the klaxons of the self-destruct device.
I can’t lie about your changes...but you have my sympathies.
4) Top Gun
If Spielberg coined the summer blockbuster with Jaws, then Don Simpson & Jerry Bruckheimer redefined it.
And the movies they made reflected the decade they were released in: the eighties. They turbo-charged the summer blockbuster with an excess of action, power chords and taut flesh in flicks like Flash Dance, Beverly Hills Cop and, our forth entry, Top Gun.
Prospero Hall (yes, them again) gets you in the mood right away with the box and components: everything is ice blue, hot pink and neon green. The game itself keeps it lean and focuses on one dynamic of the film: the homoerotic competition between Maverick and Iceman as they vie for top-of-the-class in the Air Force’s Top Gun program.
This plays out in a two act structure similar to Jaws. Act One is a basic memory game in the form of a beach volleyball match, trying to uncover your opponents’ ‘whiff’ cards from a grid of 3 X 3 cards before they can guess yours. This is a goofy little appetiser before the main event, but it does serve a purpose. The better you do in this phase, the more powerful move cards you earn in Act Two, a simulated dogfight. Thematically, there’s some justification for this. The hotshot who aced the match is going to go into a training exercise with a lot of cock to their swagger.
Act Two is a plane vs plane dogfight played out above the canyons within a 3D arena. Mechanically this shares a lot with far heavier ‘dogfight’ games such as Wings of War or Tiefighter, but keeps the rules (and the price) down to a bare minimum. Each go, both players secretly choose the direction and speed of their jet and where they’re going to aim their missiles, before simultaneously revealing, with the aim of getting behind your opponent and achieving a ‘target lock’. This part of the game is all about trying to intuit what your opponent is going to do and try to counter. The best nod to the film is that you can get an instant win by flying directly over your opponent and flipping them the bird.
Just make sure your ego doesn’t make any moves your cards can’t cash.
5) Fast & Furious Highway Heist
What started as a thinly disguised rip-off of Point Break has persisted into a franchise that seems to be keeping the 80s Bruckheimer flame going. The Fast films are basically Wacky Races with thongs and biceps, and the board game reflects this Hanna-Barbera approach to physics, as designed by, yes that's right, Prospero Hall. At this point I think we have to admit that Prospero Hall just have a knack for distilling the flavour of a film into the board game experience
Like with Alien, Fast & Furious Highway Heist is a full co-op game. Up to four of you form a gang made of Dom Toretto, Brian O’Conner et al, each with their own strengths, and pair them with cars of equal variability. Then you take on one of three heists: robbing a semi-truck, blowing up a tank or ramping your sports-car into the air and taking out a helicopter. All three of these are done whilst barrelling down a motorway at ludicrous speeds.
Each heist is broken down into a series of ever-escalating sub-missions, each granting you a reward for completing. During the game you’re going to be manoeuvring round the highway, leaping from car to car and brawling thugs atop car roofs. All this is achieved via dice-rolling skill checks. The better stat your character/car has in a certain category (such as ‘athletics’ or ‘speed’) the more likely you are to succeed. The enemy is controlled by its own stat sheet and deck of cards and can really get the jump on you: the tank veering into your lane and crushing your car, a bunch of goons leaping onto your roof and beating the stuffing out of you. It’s all suitability silly, manic and audacious.
But most of all, it’s about family.