From Board to Bytes – The Challenges of Adapting a Board Game into a Video Game
Howdy, everyone!
Today, we are thrilled to share some behind-the-scenes insights into our journey as we bring our beloved board game to life in the digital world.
Board games and video games share a love for strategy, creativity, and fun, but they’re fundamentally different beasts. While a board game thrives on tactile pieces, face-to-face interactions, and the simplicity of pen and paper, a video game must translate those elements into something intuitive, immersive, and dynamic for players sitting in front of a screen.
From reimagining mechanics for a digital interface to preserving the “feel” of the original while embracing the opportunities technology offers, every decision we’ve made has been about balancing faithfulness to the source material with the potential to enhance the experience in new and exciting ways; a necessity which clearly emerged in our previous work with Lorenzo il Magnifico.
We’ll explore some of these key challenges and share how we’ve tackled them—from redesigning complex systems to ensuring that every player, whether new or familiar with the board game, can enjoy what we’ve created.
So, put on a cozy blanket and join us on this multi-part journey!
One of the first challenges we faced was translating the sprawling board game layout into the limited space of a screen. In a board game, the table is your canvas — there’s room for large boards, detailed player areas, and all the physical components that bring the game to life. In a video game, however, the screen is finite, and every pixel matters.
Our primary goal was to maintain clarity and functionality while staying true to the visual and thematic elements that make the board game special. This meant rethinking how information is presented. Instead of a single sprawling board, we explored breaking it down into interactive sections, allowing players to focus on specific parts of the game without feeling overwhelmed. These parts were: the map, the personal game board, the opponents boards, and the action boards, which were redesigned and recombined in different arrangements to find which one best suited the available space.
We started working on the horizontally tightest aspect ratio we decided to support, which is 3:2, as it’s default for many productivity-focused devices, such as Microsoft’s Surface series and certain laptops and tablets. Other resolutions would then have the content to be more spaced or stretched, to increase readability and reduce the “clumsiness”— something close to a responsive UI, where elements scale well across different devices, whether you’re playing on a widescreen monitor or a smaller laptop screen.
It was immediately clear that not all information could have made it to the final cut, but we wanted to ensure the player’s experience remained smooth and intuitive nevertheless, especially for the first-time user experience. This meant implementing tooltips, hover effects, popovers and easy navigation to let players interact with the game interface without getting lost or frustrated.
In short, squeezing a big board into a small screen was like solving a puzzle. A big, complex puzzle that likes to gnaw at your fingers.
If you made it this far, thank you! We’re excited to keep sharing our progress and can’t wait for you to see how it all comes together.
And if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to share your excitement, let us know in the comments!
Until next time,
Amintiri
Today, we are thrilled to share some behind-the-scenes insights into our journey as we bring our beloved board game to life in the digital world.
Board games and video games share a love for strategy, creativity, and fun, but they’re fundamentally different beasts. While a board game thrives on tactile pieces, face-to-face interactions, and the simplicity of pen and paper, a video game must translate those elements into something intuitive, immersive, and dynamic for players sitting in front of a screen.
From reimagining mechanics for a digital interface to preserving the “feel” of the original while embracing the opportunities technology offers, every decision we’ve made has been about balancing faithfulness to the source material with the potential to enhance the experience in new and exciting ways; a necessity which clearly emerged in our previous work with Lorenzo il Magnifico.
We’ll explore some of these key challenges and share how we’ve tackled them—from redesigning complex systems to ensuring that every player, whether new or familiar with the board game, can enjoy what we’ve created.
So, put on a cozy blanket and join us on this multi-part journey!
1. Squeezing everything into a small screen
One of the first challenges we faced was translating the sprawling board game layout into the limited space of a screen. In a board game, the table is your canvas — there’s room for large boards, detailed player areas, and all the physical components that bring the game to life. In a video game, however, the screen is finite, and every pixel matters.
Our primary goal was to maintain clarity and functionality while staying true to the visual and thematic elements that make the board game special. This meant rethinking how information is presented. Instead of a single sprawling board, we explored breaking it down into interactive sections, allowing players to focus on specific parts of the game without feeling overwhelmed. These parts were: the map, the personal game board, the opponents boards, and the action boards, which were redesigned and recombined in different arrangements to find which one best suited the available space.
We started working on the horizontally tightest aspect ratio we decided to support, which is 3:2, as it’s default for many productivity-focused devices, such as Microsoft’s Surface series and certain laptops and tablets. Other resolutions would then have the content to be more spaced or stretched, to increase readability and reduce the “clumsiness”— something close to a responsive UI, where elements scale well across different devices, whether you’re playing on a widescreen monitor or a smaller laptop screen.
It was immediately clear that not all information could have made it to the final cut, but we wanted to ensure the player’s experience remained smooth and intuitive nevertheless, especially for the first-time user experience. This meant implementing tooltips, hover effects, popovers and easy navigation to let players interact with the game interface without getting lost or frustrated.
In short, squeezing a big board into a small screen was like solving a puzzle. A big, complex puzzle that likes to gnaw at your fingers.
If you made it this far, thank you! We’re excited to keep sharing our progress and can’t wait for you to see how it all comes together.
And if you have any questions, feedback, or just want to share your excitement, let us know in the comments!
Until next time,
Amintiri