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The Game Designer's Guide to Creating Licensed Tabletop Games
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781032949772
Publisher: CRC Press
Published: May 14 2026
Pages: 188
Weight: 0.63
Height: 0.42 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
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.
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