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Treasure Tables is dedicated to game masters, offering GMing advice and ideas since 2005. I'm Martin Ralya, and I've been GMing since 1989 and writing for the RPG industry since 2004.
Treasure Tables is on hiatus as of December 13th, 2007 -- after two years of daily posts, I needed a break. If you're looking for GMing material, I have two recommendations: the hundreds of posts in TT's archives, and my new project, the multi-author GMing blog Gnome Stew. Happy GMing! -- Martin
Using the Stuff in Boardgames
Mon. August 28, 2006
Alysia and I have a huge shelf full of boardgames, and many of them are full of stuff. Miniatures, map tiles, funky dice, chips and countless other little widgets — many of which seem like they could be pretty useful at the gaming table. And yet, for some reason I’ve never thought to give this a try!
Have you cannibalized boardgames for RPG goodies before? If so, which ones? What are the most creative uses you’ve found for boardgame bits?
More posts about: Approaches and Techniques
Comments
12 Responses to “Using the Stuff in Boardgames”
I’ve got a set of old DND character creation dice stolen from a yahtzee set, they are guarded (in the same holder) by a goblin stolen from heroquest. I tend to use ambigouous game pieces, like pawns from yahtzee, or pieces from a plastic chess set painted in different colors. My players then go “I attack the red pawn goblin.”
If I’m feeling mean, I threaten to base their next session off of the old canydland board game that sits in my closet . . .
You know, your Canydland idea might be a lot of fun for a brief, dream-based side trek. It wouldn’t work in every game, but man would that be freaky.
Watch out for Lord Lichoriche!
My players encounter thimble-monsters and oversized Scotties frequently, making my Monopoly board a valuable investment.[/scarcasm]
Actually, and I know this isn’t unique–I use Lego guys a lot to represent NPCs. They don’t work so well as monsters–I’d rather have a token than something that gets laughed at–but they’re great for Barmaid #3.
Other than stealing dice, I haven’t really stolen much from my board game collection. Which is too bad– there are a ton of pieces. Given how many of the games are train centered, we might have to work in a train mechanic. “Seven freight cars and an engine? The kobold hurls through the air and smashes flat into the tree…”
Needs a little work.
This isn’t relevant, but some of the responses sparked this thought, so I decided to share.
I was co-running a LARP and one of the PCs was an archaeologist presenting an ancient artifact recently uncovered in an underwater dig. One of my co-GMs suggested that we get a prop. Unfortunately, we were already at the session, so I grabbed something from the rear floor of my car.
The object was covered by a towel through most of the presentation. The PC spent 15 minutes talking about this mysterious artifact that defied classification. And then, during applause, she unveiled the artifact.
It was a small, furry-haired troll doll dressed in a Redskins uniform.
Needless to say, the LARP was put on hold for several minutes while everybody was busting their guts.
I’ve talked about the pieces I took from the Titan board game when our college gaming club was cleaning up the closet (we merged two incomplete Titan games into a complete one, plus some spares, and I think I paid a few bucks for the rest of the extra counters). I’ve got a few other pieces stolen from board games.
Frank
Here a list of games I have ripped and their purpose:
- Heroquest: doors and tiles for miniatures battles
- Claymore Saga: Plastic Miniatures for villains
- Risk (LOTR): Crappy game, but the small miniatures are great for large battles.
- Varoius games: ripped for tokens representing valuable objects, coins and treasures.
-Racko: the stands hold init cards nicely
-Once Upon a Time: the cards work nicely for plot ideas.
non games:
-Lego: (Hubby did a sacrilege - put together lego guy with scorpion for head to make a makeshift mindflayer. It was beyond wrong…I couldn’t keep from giggling.)
I’ve pillaged (or tried to pillage):
Boggle - sand timer.
Scrabble tiles - puzzles.
Bloodbowl - the whole game.
Dominoes - random dungeon generator for two-player, no GM AD&D. We moved our PC group half a domino at a time, and if we rolled the same number that was on the domino half, we had an encounter. We built the dungeon one tile at a time, taking turns.
Monopoly - the money tray for in-game money we made and printed at one time.
Operation - the whole game.
Trouble - d6 roller and initiative tracker.
Snake ‘n Ladders - a lame plot-building experiment where I dealt Torg cards onto the game board squares.
Talisman - more failed experiments with using the cards in-game as random generators.
Trivial Pursuit - a never-finished experiment where the game board represented an Empire’s government. Each colored space on the board represented authority, level, prestige, honor, charisma, or influence. PCs tried to follow a path of their choosing to the middle (emporer). My players were in were in kingdom builder mode back then.
Catan - tiles; failed expriement to generate random maps.
Great stuff so far! This is exactly what I had in mind when I was thinking about my game collection, only much more creative.
Dominoes - long before any other dungeon tile/scenery products were available, gamers were using dominoes to lay out dungeons for their players.
Avalon Hill’s Wilderness Survival boardgame - called out by the original D&D books as a source of a world map.
Chess/Checkers - map board with squares for running combats with miniatures. I might have even used the chess pieces for monsters.
Avalon Hill’s Midway game - used the game board as a backing for my hand created DM’s screen.
Cry Havoc and other games from Standard Games - they have awesome 1″ hex maps that cry out for use in gaming.
Not that I ever used it (but I did eventually purchase): Azanti High Lightning, a board game based off Traveler that provided deck plans for a huge ship in 15mm scale.
I used to have a small container of pieces stolen from various games, pawns, counters, and other tokens.
Cards and poker chips used as components in Deadlands.
Frank