As a longtime fan of the mainline platformer games, you can probably imagine that my mind was racing a mile a minute when ‘Rayman‘ and ‘trailer‘ popped up in my subscription feed on YouTube. Of course, the 2.7 seconds of pure joy and excitement were immediately tempered once I noticed the words “The Board Game” sandwiched in between those two words.
Now, to be entirely fair, the simply titled Rayman: The Board Game looks pretty fun at first glance, and there’s certainly plenty of talent on the development team. The project is a collaboration between FLYOS (a board game company that already has a few releases under its belt, including Vampire: The Masquerade — CHAPTERS) and Maxime Tardif, who’s best known for designing the much-beloved Earth, which took home a handful of awards last year.
As you can see in the trailer above, it’s hard to argue that Rayman: The Board Game doesn’t emulate the look of Rayman Legends. The artwork closely matches a few familiar areas (namely, Toad Story and Living Dead Party). Enemies and characters are ripped straight out of the video games, and the included Rayman, Globox, Barbara, Grand Minimus, and Murfy figures might just be enough of a reason for a diehard amiibo collector such as myself to pick up a copy down the line.
They may have nailed the look, but there’s part of me that can’t help but wonder how Rayman: The Board Game will fare when it comes to matching the ‘feel’ of the games it’s based on. To better illustrate what I’m getting at, let’s look at a few other video-to-board game adaptations.
While I haven’t given it a go myself, the Fallout board game seems like a natural extension of the franchise; after all, Bethesda’s cash cow is, first and foremost, an RPG, and one could argue that the first two Fallout games are essentially digital tabletop games. Slay the Spire also received its own board game adaptation — another no-brainer seeing as how Slay the Spire is essentially a digital deckbuilding game to begin with. Cuphead has its own dice-rolling game, Deadly Premonition was adapted into a murder mystery with hidden roles; the list goes on and on. Heck, even This War of Mine was turned into a tabletop game, receiving a lot of praise for capturing the bleak, anxiety-inducing feeling of the original.
Call me a cynic, but I’m not entirely sold on the idea of turning Rayman, a series that most associate with fast-paced platforming, into a board game that revolves around taking turns and playing cards to move around a map. Sure, the “moves” you can pull off by playing the cards in your hand (jumping, floating, punching, and the like) are core mechanics of the game, but there’s a big difference between playing a platformer and mimicking one.
With Rayman: The Board Game hitting Kickstarter next month, we won’t have to wait too long to see how this adaptation fares, and I certainly hope I’ll be proven wrong once we get a proper look at how it plays. Until then, I’ll focus my attention on its impressive figures.
