Many TV shows, films, and novels help add character to their narrative universes by mentioning the games played by the characters.
Shows and franchises as wildly disparate as Battlestar Galactica, New Girl, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Witcher, and Pretty Little Liars have fictional games that enrich their worlds.
But sometimes, either through clever marketing or the affection of fans, these games go from fictional recreational activities to real ones, crawling fully formed from the imagination to be enjoyed across tabletops worldwide.
Today, I’d like to introduce you to a few of them. Let’s play, shall we?
Tri-Dimensional Chess
Star Trek has been a source of many fictional games and sports over the years. Dom-jot, Chula, Dabo, Parrises Squares, and Stratagema are some of the more famous ones, but the granddaddy of Star Trek games is Tri-Dimensional Chess.
First appearing in the original series back in 1966, Tri-Dimensional Chess follows the normal rules of chess, but spread across different vertical levels. So a knight could move in its usual L-shaped format, but on its own board OR the boards above and below.
Over the years — and across different Star Trek series — we’ve heard stories about key maneuvers like the Aldabren Exchange and the Kriskov Gambit in games of Tri-Dimensional Chess, helping flesh out how influential the game is for several characters. (Heck, in one episode, Spock beats the Enterprise computer at the game, saving Kirk from a court martial!)
The Franklin Mint has released limited edition versions of the game on two occasions, and I’ve seen homemade games of Tri-Dimensional Chess at gaming and pop culture conventions over the years.
Chess remains incredibly popular — as do many variants of Chess — so it’s no surprise this fictional game made the leap to the real world. (I suspect the complicated three-person Chess game developed by Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory is less likely to make a similar leap. Especially since there are already three-person Chess games on the market today.)
Cones of Dunshire
Ben Wyatt of Parks and Recreation enjoyed many nerdy pastimes, but Cones of Dunshire was his masterpiece.
Initially treated as a mistake, a nonsensical result of his boredom and frustrations, the game becomes a running gag in the show after Ben leaves a copy as a gift for the accounting firm that he has been hired by (and walked away from) several times during the show’s run.
Later, we find out the game has been commercially produced, and Ben stumbles across it when dealing with a dotcom company. He mentions that he invented it, but his claims are dismissed. He then proves not only his gaming skill but his authorship of the game when he beats the dotcom bosses in a tense playthrough.
It’s mentioned once that a gaming magazine called Cones of Dunshire “punishingly intricate,” a point that makes Ben proud.
Part of the fun of Cones of Dunshire (other than the parody of Settlers of Catan) is that the viewer never really understands what’s going on, so supposedly dramatic moments can be played for laughs. (I also appreciate that the name of the game is basically a fancy way of saying “dunce hat.”)
And, in the sort of cyclical storytelling that could only happen in a nerdly pursuit like board games, the company that made Settlers of Catan — Mayfair Games — produced a giant version of the game as part of a charity event at GenCon.
Both the silliest and most ambitious game to cross from fictional to real, Cones of Dunshire is a nerdy highlight of a now classic sitcom.
Tak: A Beautiful Game
Originally introduced in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles novels as a tavern game, Tak made the leap to the real world as a stretch goal in a Kickstarter campaign for another game.
Game designer James Ernest accepted the challenge of bringing the game to life, and his collaboration with Rothfuss created one of my all-time favorite board games.
Tak has a very simple concept: two players each attempt to build a road connecting opposite sides of the game board. The first player to successfully complete their road wins.
To do so, you place game pieces called stones, one at a time, on various spaces on the board. The stones can either be played flat (meaning they’re part of your road) or standing on edge (meaning they’re a wall, blocking any road’s passage through that space).
It’s a rare thing when a new game feels like something that could’ve been played in taverns centuries ago. For me, this is the gold standard when it comes to adapting fictional games to the real world.
Pai Sho
A key storytelling device in the much-beloved show Avatar: The Last Airbender, Pai Sho was a tactical tile-based game that reinforced important themes in the show.
The game had many variants (often played differently depending on the faction or nation featured) but each had the feeling of an ancient game passed down across generations.
In the most popular variant, Skud Pai Sho, the goal is to form a harmony ring around the center point of the board. Players create harmonies by placing two harmonious tiles on the same line without other tiles or obstacles. There are gates, gardens, and lines that help dictate play, as well as multiple flower tiles for players to place that accomplish different things when placed properly.
There are entire forums and websites dedicated to the rules of Pai Sho and its many variants, and the thriving fan community that continues to nurture these games well after the show’s conclusion make this one of the most heartfelt and successful transitions from fictional to real life that I can think of.
Sabacc
In The Empire Strikes Back, we learn about the friendly rivalry between Lando Calrissian and Han Solo, and how a wager led to the Millennium Falcon changing hands.
But exactly how it happened was only revealed later in supplementary material like the Star Wars Visual Encyclopedia and the novel Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu.
The second draft of the script for The Empire Strikes Back mentioned that Lando won Cloud City in a “sabacca” game, but by the time additional stories fleshed out the relationship between Lando and Han, the game had been shortened to Sabacc.
It’s sort of a combination of poker and Blackjack. You want the value of the cards in your hand to be as close to 23 or -23 as possible. Sounds simple, right?
Well, imagine a game of poker where the cards in your hand changed periodically unless you publicly locked them in by placing them on the table, where they stayed until the hand was over. That’s the basic idea behind Sabacc.
There were numerous fan versions of the game over the years, but now you can get Sabacc decks at Disney theme parks (alongside many, many, MANY other items).
Do you have a favorite fictional game that made the leap to the real world? Did we miss any major ones? Let us know in the comments below!
PuzzCulture 