Thursday, August 18, 2016

A Month of... Board Games! Day 18: Pimp Your TARDIS


In this series so far I've shown you one or two early Doctor Who board games from the Doctor Who Annual. The BBC still faithfully puts out DW Annuals every year (frequently available for the "get 'em out of here" cost of 99p in your local British Waterstones' the day after Christmas), but the beautiful hand-drawn and -colored games of the '60s and '70s have given way to computer-designed, photo-illustrated, font-lettered games of today:

"Race Against Time" in Doctor Who: The Official Annual 2010 (BBC Children's Books, August 2009)
(Click picture to Broadchurch-size)

As you can see, nothing too game-changing (hah!) here in design or play, although if I were you, BBC, I would have deleted that second-to-last square because we're all still pretty sensitive about that. But I wanted to spotlight this one because of its diabolically trope-breaking game counters. While the games (and I) usually encourage you to dig into your Paddington coin bank and dig out a few farthings and thrupenny bits, here it's absolutely necessary that you clip out the multi-colored Tardii:


It's the Legion of Multicolored Tardises!

The Green Doctor saves the earth but environmentally. The Red Doctor is annoyed that people keep wandering into his TARDIS to make a phone call. The Yellow Doctor is rich with potassium.

1 comment:

Smurfswacker said...

I get the strangest impression that all these games are basically the same game: advance, lose turn, return to start, go back spaces, etc. I guess no one figured it was worth the effort to create an original, more complex game. Remember when the short-lived TSR comics attempted to put an RPG (uh, role-playing game, not rocket-propelled grenade) into each comic? (Although they may have sold better with the other kind of RPG.)