Games can be defined in a lot of different ways. They can come in different styles, from American take-that to Eurogames, from party games to abstracts. They can can in different fictional genres, from science-fiction to history, and in different mechanical genres, from worker placement to auctions. Finally, games can also be parts of different mediums, primarily including board games, card games, and dice games.

Gaming mediums are particularly interesting because they seem to encourage conversions. Board games become card games or dice games, and vice-versa. This trend seems to have been growing in the last few years, as Intellectual Property has become a byword of the eurogame community. Alea is currently be the poster child of IP conversions, with Broom Service (2015), Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game (2016), and Broom Service: The Card Game (2016) all being conversions of this sort. The last is particularly notable, since Broom Service: The Card Game began life as Witch’s Brew (2008) … a card game!

So are medium conversions good or bad?

Too frequently they result in a game that’s a pale shadow of its originator. I know I’ve played Euphrates & Tigris: Contest of Kings (2005), but I barely remember it, while Shadows Over Camelot: The Card Game (2012) and Bang! The Dice Game (2013) were more interesting, but in no way overshadowed the original. But, in some cases you get games that are quite exciting. San Juan (2004) is obviously the vest example of a game that managed to massively innovate its predecessor, creating something that was as good, in its own way.

This week I’m going to take a brief look at three games that were converted to new sorts of dice and card games: one of the newest entrants to the field and two that I think really worked.

The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game (2016)

One of the newest conversions is The Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game, which takes Stefan Feld’s game of rolling dice to collect tiles for placement on a board and converts it over to a card game … where there’s obviously no board for placement.

Conversions: So what changed? To start with, The Card Game needed to remove the board and the tiles. Tiles just became cards, but the removal of the board resulted in some more notable changes, because Burgundy’s board controlled which tiles could be placed and also how those tiles scored. There’s no longer a limit on placing cards (tiles), but scoring has been totally revamped.

The biggest change to scoring is that each color of card (tile) now scores when you complete a triplet of that color. I found this to be a really elegant change, because set collection of this type is pretty integral to card game play, so it was a natural translation. Animals similarly score now as sets (of unlike animals), while goods continue to score whenever you take a score-goods action.

There were also some simplifications, which is a general trend for board to card conversions. For example knowledge tiles, which used to give special end-game victory points or special in-game powers, now just generate a couple of workers. I thought this was a very elegant simplification because it removed a whole, complex subsystem and instead integrated the tiles into an existing game system. Boats offer another example of an elegant simplification. They give you a good and the first-player marker, as opposed to the action in the board game, which gives you 0 or more goods depending on the state of the board and advances your marker along a first-player track. Simplifications feel critical to me when you’re moving to the simpler mediums of dice and card games — though the boat changes are strong enough that I wonder if they should have been used in the original game too.

Non-Conversions: The beauty of Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game (and all the particularly successful conversions) is a thematic similarity. The core actions (take cards and place cards) feel the same; the core problems (tactically using your limited actions and building without wasting actions) feel the same; and many of the specific elements (such as the powers of almost all the cards) feel the same. However, I think that conversions of this sort succeed when they have strong thematic similarity without overdoing the specific mechanical similarity, and here Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game falters a bit.

The usage of dice in The Card Game is what feels the most problematic to me. No, there aren’t actual dice in the new game, but the cards are printed with die faces, and those are what you use to select and place cards and to sell cards. It’s a perfect duplicate for the original gameplay, but it also feels like an overly obvious duplication — pretending to have dice in a medium without them.

The other problem with Castles of Burgundy is the wholesale duplication of game elements. If there’s a game element in the original board game, it’s probably here too, whether it be goods, animals, or victory point bonuses. As a result, your playing surface in Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game will be a mess. There were be numerous piles of cards, scattered here and there, and that type of chaos doesn’t make for a good gaming experience.

Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game feels like it repeats many of the good gaming elements of the original board game, while adapting some features of card game play. However, it stubbornly holds onto too many of the old gaming elements rather than totally embracing card game play, and the result is a little awkward and a little messy. I think this will be played as a slightly poorer cousin to the board game, acceptable for its shorter gameplay, but not a strong alternative otherwise.

Ra: The Dice Game (2009)

Ra: The Dice Game offers a pretty massive change to the core Ra mechanics: you’re rolling dice instead of auctioning lots. Despite that, it feels like almost a perfect match for the spirit and the feel of the original Ra.

Conversions: The biggest change in The Dice Game is the eponymous use of dice. In Ra you auctioned lots of tiles with limited sun resources. In The Dice Game you instead roll dice, producing what’s essentially a lot of goods, with what you get shown on the dice faces. It’s a stunningly big change, but also one that really plays to the advantages of dice. It’s possible to get bad rolls, when you roll suns or insufficient civilizations or monuments, and it’s also possible to get really exciting results.

The Dice Game also replaces those tiles you collect with the use of tracks. In other words, you record what you gain using cubes that are placed on a board. It would have been really easy for the game to keep tiles, telling players to draw them when they rolled the dice appropriately, but instead Knizia figured out how to incorporate most of his tile’s information into simple tracks. The result is elegant and obvious (though you do lose the evocativeness of those various tiles that you could draw in Ra).

Non-Conversions: Despite these tidal changes, The Dice Game still feels exactly like the original. That in part comes from identical scoring. Though you collect goods in different ways, and though you record goods in different ways, the scoring rules are largely the same. For example civilizations still score -5 for no civilizations and then have a big jump to +5 for three. Similarly, monuments have some big score jumps when you have a lot of different monuments or a lot of the same.

This is supported by similar rarities. Knizia has done a marvelous job of mirroring the rarity of tiles with the difficulty of rolling specific dice combinations. Want a “flood tile” for your land? You need to roll a few Niles at once. Want to score the bonuses for having five of the same monument? You have to keep rolling monument turn after turn, because only your first monument roll of each turn can be added to an existing monument.

Ra: The Dice Game offers an almost picture-perfect example of how to perfectly convert the feel and spirit of a game while almost totally revamping the mechanics. There’s actually a pretty good argument for playing the dice game instead of the original, especially if you have players who don’t like auctions. (But with that said Ra: The Dice Game is still limited by its predecessor, not adding much to the gameplay.)

Roll for the Galaxy (2014)

Roll for the Galaxy is probably the most successful conversion after San Juan, with its clever change from the card-based play of Race for the Galaxy (2007) to a dice-based medium.

Conversions: The big change in Roll is in how you activate roles. Just like in Race, each player selects one role in each round of play. However, Race then falls back to a hodge-podge of other mechanics to determine how well each player activates a role’s powers: explore lets you draw a set number of card; develop and settle require you to empower them with cards from your hand; trade is limited to one, while consume is limited by consumer powers; and production happens on every world. Conversely, Roll changes this into a much more elegant and balanced system: each die you contribute to a role gets you one bit of power.

Rather than trying to stay within the bounds of the original Race’s rules, Roll then extrapolates this idea to its natural conclusions. For example, the develop and settle actions are no longer bounded by being able to build just a single card … because the ubiquitous and standardized way that players use dice to empower roles offers all the bounds needed.

Overall, this new system of rolls for roles is another example of how to totally reinvent a mechanic while still maintaining its core ideas.

There are other subtle changes from Race to Roll. For example production used to happen after consumption, but now occurs before. These are great examples of how you can make increasingly notable changes in a conversion if the new mode of play calls for them, rather than just blindly sticking to how things were done.

Non-Conversions: Roll keeps the standard roles (phases of play) of Race, they’re just sometimes used in different ways. For example, explore gets you cards in Race, but those cards had two purposes: they were currency and they were buildings. Roll splits up its currency and its buildings, so now explore earn you either.

This points to how the economy is quite similar too. You expend a resource (cards in Race, dice in Roll), then need to get them back to build more. In both games this occurs through both explore and trade actions. With that said, the specifics of the economy are quite different: as noted, it changed from cards to dice (and in fact Roll also uses dollars as an intermediary for its dice purchases).

The thing that surprised me the most about Roll was its non-conversion of the building cards. Just like in Race, you get cards with complex special powers that you then build. Having previously been won over by Ra: The Dice Game, this non-conversion felt like a bit of a betrayal: it was keeping a pretty big chunk of the original game! I’ve since decided it’s a fine alternative: the rest of the game has been re-sculpted enough to allow true dice-based play that I can’t complain about the designers deciding to leave in the core of the original game’s evocative and strategic play.

More so than either of my other examples, play of Roll for the Galaxy has totally replaced its predecessor in my local groups. Race got unfortunately messy with expansions, then Roll rolled in with streamlined, exciting play that won a lot of folks over.

Conclusion

I think that Ra: The Dice Game and Roll for the Galaxy were both extremely successful conversions from card play to dice play. Castles of Burgundy: The Card Game, which instead made the jump from board play to card play, is a perfectly OK game, but was somewhat less successful.

I personally think that’s because success in this sort of conversion comes mainly from how much you’re willing to embrace your new medium. Ra and Roll both did so whole-heartedly, while Burgundy holds on to more vestigial features than I think is healthy.

If you want to go further, to go from a good conversion to a great conversion, that requires something really innovative and new. It’s definitely not something you’ll get from just a straight-up translation. But you can manage it while still maintaining the feel of the original game if you’re a great designer. The dice resources of Roll for the Galaxy and the card resources of San Juan (and Roll for the Galaxy) both offer fine examples of taking this path.

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