There's nothing you have to do," says Medeiros. He designed last year's Fallout Shelter, based on the app-based management sim of the same name, which certainly seems like a much more natural fit in cardboard than an open-world RPG with a Dostoevsky-sized script. Why would Civilization: A New Dawn function any differently? You can even make the argument that Fischer lucked out with his second Fallout venture. Civilization VI already plays like a board game. Elsewhere, the adaptations make more logical sense. Wiley with a fistful of dice to middling results. Occasionally, 8-bit classics are resurrected from the deep with a fresh coat of paint and a slew of pretty miniatures: 2016's Mega-Man: The Board Game attempted to reimagine a showdown with Dr. Dark Souls and Doom both earned dungeon-crawling modules, and Riot Games themselves created a lavish, $100 League of Legends parlor game called Mechs vs. FromSoftware's Bloodborne, which packs some of the most visceral combat controls of all time, received both a card game and board game adaptation in the last six years. We are living through an unprecedented boom period for tabletop adaptations of video games, and that has required countless designers to distill 3D, fully-automated environments into a pile of plastic chits. To be clear, Fischer isn't the only person attempting to solve that puzzle. You have to identify that, and create systems in an entirely different medium to capture it. "You're presented with a question of what the quintessential experience associated with a popular video game is. It's like a problem you need to solve," says Fischer, reflecting on his Fallout design. In the video game, on the other hand, you might let the main quest just sit on the map." But that didn't pan out in testing, because players want some sort of tension or uncertainty working toward the game's conclusion. You just played it until the story finished-just to experience the narrative. In one of my early designs of the board game, I took that to heart. "In the Fallout video games, you play until you're done with the story, or whenever else you feel satisfied. When multiple people sit down at a table together, there's this social contract that they're entering into an activity, and that activity has a distinct end," says Fischer, who is one of the designers at Fantasy Flight Games that authored the Fallout board game, in an interview with WIRED. "There's a fundamental difference between single-player video games and board games. So, how could anyone condense that entire experience-the huge gamut of emotions, story beats, and quirky diversions crucial to a Fallout adventure-into a two-hour board game? Fischer says that was his greatest challenge when he set off to bring the wasteland to kitchen tables. Hell, sometimes we even set the side quests aside in order to bask peacefully under the wide open night sky during the brief breaks between super mutant assaults. To truly appreciate Fallout, one must commune with the ghouls, and ride with the raiders, and spelunk through blown-out cafeterias and coffee shops long before we see the credits roll. The twisted steel and charred homesteads sprawl out in every direction, and it's hard to feel fully satiated by your save file until you've explored every square inch of the atlas. Gamers sink literally hundreds of hours into Bethesda's Fallout games.
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