Design it Yourself #1: WATCHMEN The BOARD GAME

The Challenge: How would YOU design a WATCHMEN board game?

Watchmen is a rich thematic setting for a game. You've got dozens of interesting characters and locations, spanning decades of history. You've got the Black Freighter. You've got Richard Nixon. You've got Mothman.

If you were to create a Watchmen board game, what aspects of that setting would you emphasize? What would be the objective of such a game? How would it look? In what ways would the rules reflect the ideas expressed in the book?

Bonus Points: Don't mention the blue dong.

Well since co-op games seem to be all the rage now, that's the path I'd take. The players take individual roles of The Watchmen (circa late 70's) prior to the Keene Act.

There would be a map of NYC showing different locations referenced in the book. There will also be various scales representing the "ills" of America (remember the map that Cap Metropolis was pinning the "ills" to). An event deck would be setup and various happenings start cropping up around the city. Basically the goal for the players would be to keep crime low so the city doesn't spiral into chaos losing the game and keep their own actions in check (in otherwords the Watchmen will have to Watch the Watchmen) to make sure their bounds aren't overstepped to the point that they get banned again losing the game.

Then of course the different characters would have different abilities, like Rorschach would be better at getting crime under control in a zone, but he'll quickly get the Keene Act passed. Manhattan would have powers of a god and his beat stick of justice, but the more he interacts with humans the greater chance he has of retreating to Mars.

Well just an idea off the top of my head. The problem I see with The Watchmen though is the story just lacks "gamey" elements. There is also a posibility for a murder mystery type game as well, but I wouldn't know where to begin to start pulling that one off.

LvT

Actually, there are things about the ANDROID design that would make for a fairly reasonable WATCHMEN-ish game- the branching storylines, the independent character arcs, conspiracy stuff, investigation concept. I think making a 1:1 adaption of the game would be as much a disaster as the movie, but something inspired by WATCHMEN could totally work. Much how ANDROID is inspired by great SF, a superhero-themed board game about something other than moving around a city and punching villains could be something extra special.

BUT NOW, if they're going to make a board game about the WATCHMEN _movie_...

- Every player gets to be Rorschach. There are red, green, blue, and yellow pawns each representing Rorschach.
- The "Dan's Sexual Performance" spinner gauges how far he gets with Laurie, all the way from the disappointment of erectile dysfunction way up to "Hallelujah". Putting on a costume lets you skip spinning and go straight to "Hallelujah".
- A special deck of "Fatality" cards that can be used to perform exasperatingly graphic finishing moves on the bad guys.
- A blue jelly dong. (DAMN IT, I lost those bonus points)

It would only be a partial co-op. Everyone would have individual goals they need to achieve by the end of the game. You can have shared victories, and getting help from others helps you achieve your personal goal so factions can naturally develop.

Goals would need to be flexible enough that somethings other than what's in the book can take place. Rorschach wants to find Comedian's killer - could have the killer be randomly determined...could be another player, could be an NPC character or entity. Spectre wants to find romance...can try to woo any of the other characters...get closer to her goal by helping others achieve theirs. Ozy wants to cause a cataclysm - be it Manhattan bombs, giant psychic aliens, mass erectile-dysfunction, etc. Dr. Manhattan plays solitaire for most of the game, then at the end decides who wins and/or flips the table.

LordVonTush wrote:

Then of course the different characters would have different abilities, like Rorschach would be better at getting crime under control in a zone, but he'll quickly get the Keene Act passed.

That's a pretty cool idea, actually. "I wish I could solve this crime with the meat cleaver, but then Nixon will advance two spaces on the Keene Act track."

One of my favorite themes in the book is time, and how it's perceived. Dr. Manhattan perceives time as though the universe is a comic book. It's just another spacial dimension; each tick of the clock is like a panel on the page -- it exists eternally and simultaneously with every other moment. We only "see" time because of the way we chose to read the book. Laurie, on the other hand, has a nostalgic view of the past that she's trying to live up to. That view shatters when she learns the truth about her relationship to The Comedian. The golden age heroes are sort of portrayed as victims of time. They started out representing hope and idealism, unaware of how badly things would go for them.

I'd try to deal with this theme in a Watchmen board game. I imagine a board with three sections -- one representing the career of the Minutemen in the 40s, one representing the Crimebusters in the 60s, and one representing the Watchmen in the 80s. All three eras are played simultaneously, with events in one era affecting the other two. I figure there'd be Event cards. A single event card would describe three different events, one for each era. That way, if you used an event card in the 60s, the other two events on that card could never transpire.

That's an interesting idea...didn't that KHRONOS game a couple of years ago attempt some kind of simultaneous time thing? I never played it, but I remember reading about it and thinking "hey, that'd be cool in something other than a Eurogame where it'll be wasted".

The layering of time is a HUGE theme in WATCHMEN that the film actually manages pretty well (particularly during Dr. Manhattan's middle-of-the-film intermission).

Huh, I just checked out Khronos. It has the same idea of playing simultaneously on three different boards. The only sense, though, in which there is any kind of temporal relationship between the boards is that a building constructed in historical era #1 will automatically get built in historical era #2 and appear as a ruin in historical era #3. That kind of thing. The rest of the game involves placement of squares on a grid a la Domaine or Tigris and Euphrates. The element of time just makes abstract tactical decisions harder to evaluate because you have to consider how they effect three boards, instead of one. The game is as much about time as Through the Desert is about camels.

I want a Watchmen Event card to be like:
1940s: Hooded Justice kills Comedian for raping Silk Spectre I
1960s: Comedian refuses to assist USA in Viet Nam War, is forced into retirement by Keene Act
1980s: Comedian murdered by Ozymandias

Each event is exclusive of the others. For example, if Comedian had retired in the 60s, Ozymandias wouldn't have needed to kill him. The idea is that decisions made in the 40s or 60s constrain the sorts of decisions that can be made in the 80s.

For the different phases of the game we could have a BIG BLUE wooden sphere so each player knows what time it is. Booya!

Anyhoo...

You should include a side track ala 1960 to play the Comedian's back story.

I'd make it like Cash-N-Guns. You're all guessing who's killing each other off.

And then you point the (included!) big blue dongs at each other.

This just in!

drmabuse00 wrote:

This just in!

Nice find, Anthony Santiago!