The Game Designer’s Guide to Creating Licensed Tabletop Games

This book explains the steps in creating a licensed tabletop game and the factors which influence its design using examples, including the designer’s first-hand experience of converting the Fallout videogames into Fallout: Wasteland Warfare.

Converting an existing property, such as a videogame or film, into a tabletop game provides all the challenges of tabletop design whilst adding many more challenges, restrictions, limitations, and pressures. This book covers all the necessary topics, such as:

• Gaining a license and working with a licensor
• Identifying boundaries the license creates, which defines the design space in which the game must exist
• Studying the IP’s setting to understand what the tabletop game can be, how to extract principles and details from that setting, and the important challenges that must be resolved
• Addressing the inevitable changes to the source material that must occur when adapting to the tabletop medium
• Creating the game mechanics – the most fundamental building blocks of all – and imbuing them with the license to portray the IP’s characters, action, and atmosphere.

The book takes the reader through the process of designing a licensed tabletop game and explains how a license adds opportunities to be embraced and challenges to be overcome. Using behind-the-scenes knowledge of creating licensed games, the experience, insights, and lessons learned from a career in games will assist and inspire readers to bring a licensed world to life.

This book will be ideal reading for games professionals looking to learn best practices for designing games based on existing properties.