The Board Game Remix Kit

Way back in 2010, an actual decade ago, I was working for a company called Hide&Seek, and we teamed up with Kevan Davis and James Wallis to make something called The Board Game Remix Kit: a set of games you could play using the pieces from games you might already have lying around the house: Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, Cluedo (or Clue to Americans) and Scrabble.

Hide&Seek closed in 2014, and the Board Game Remix Kit kind-of fell out of existence. Last week someone emailed me asking if it was still available anywhere, and I had to go logging into old email accounts and searching for attachments to find it. But once we’d found it again, we thought: well, might as well put it online, just in case anyone’s staying at home with a pile of old board games and wants to try something new.

So here it is! Available for free under a creative commons license, both the original version and a small Valentine’s-themed expansion. All in all that’s 30 new ideas for games to play with the pieces from these four almost-omnipresent games.

There are quick tweaks (Scrabble where you know what letters are coming, Trivial Pursuit with phones allowed). There are strategic battles (defend the Cluedo mansion from zombies; team up with a partner to accrue as much Monopoly property as possible then split it all in an acrimonious divorce). There are releaxing, silly family games (use the Monopoly board as a prompt for telling stories; build words out of Scrabble tiles and argue about which would win in a fight).

But there’s plenty more info about the Kit over on itch.io, where you can download it right now for free. So I thought I might write here not about the Kit itself but about the process of designing it.

The target audience for The Boardgame Remix Kit was basically: people who like board games but who were going to stay with family over the holidays and who were terrified that they were going to have to play another interminable game of Monopoly. Hide&Seek’s director Alex Fleetwood came up with the idea in maybe mid-autumn, and we got it ready in a rush in time for Christmas, pulling in Kevan and James to co-design and co-write. It was an interesting mix of designers: everyone had a really wide-ranging games background, but very broadly Alex and I came mostly from events and live games (“pervasive games”, as the phrase was then), James was more of a tabletop specialist, Kevan had done more with digital.

As I recall, The Boardgame Remix Kit did pretty well: we made an app version, a tiny print-on-demand book, and some gorgeous big physical cards; we had a launch party, to which I wore a big orange and green dress and during which I fell over twice out of an excess of enthusiasm; people seemed to like the Kit, in many cases to play but also just to read and think about.

Ten years later, I’d say that it’s less likely that anyone who doesn’t like, say, Cluedo is going to end up having to play a bitter drawn-out game of it against grudging cousins. I mean, even apart from the fact that a lot of us aren’t leaving our houses and seeing those grudging cousins just now. In the decade since the Kit came out, more and more games have become available from mainstream stores; a lot of people with boardgame enthusiast relatives who a decade ago couldn’t be coaxed into learning a new set of rules have now given in and learned, maybe, Carcassonne or Codenames, even if they still don’t want to learn a whole new game every December.

So perhaps, under normal circumstances, there’s less call now for something like The Board Game Remix Kit. (Though that said, the four games we cover still take up something like 20% of the slots in Amazon’s top 100 best-selling board games list. There are a lot of different versions of Monopoly…)

But for me, thinking about it in 2020, the interesting thing about the Kit isn’t so much the games we came up with. It was the process of designing them. Sitting there with the pieces and touching them and trying to think of all the different affordances, all the things you could use them for beyond their intended purpose. Pulling out two games at once and seeing if it was fun to put the tiles from Scrabble on the movement squares from Cluedo (spoiler: no). Sitting around in a group and brainstorming dozens of ideas and seeing which ones stuck. Coming up with ridiculous themes and then seeing if we could get the game to work - we never did quite come up with a sound ruleset for the game Secret Wee, inspired by the fact that the Cluedo mansion has no bathrooms, but there are plenty of hidden corners if you can just get out of everyone else’s line of sight...

When we playtested, so many of the testers made suggestions - not just for changes, which is standard for playtesting, but for new games that they’d invented that they thought we should design. Sometimes they’d have a pun for a title that they thought we could expand on; sometimes it was a whole set of interlocking mechanics, almost ready to go.

And now that the Kit is back out in the world, a lot of the discussion I’ve seen around it isn’t about the games themselves, but instead involves people recounting their own reinventions of different board games, or suggesting ideas for alternate rulesets that they’ve always thought about but never quite tried out.

So although I’m really glad that we’ve resurrected the Kit, and I do think that if you’ve got any of those four games lying around it’s definitely worth having a look, perhaps the biggest thing to take from the project is: making up different ways to play can be just as much fun as actually playing. And having the constraint of an existing board game and its pieces and themes can be a really powerful spur to ideas, even among people who don’t normally design games.

So do download The Board Game Remix Kit: there are some really fun and funny ideas there, I think, ten years on. But also maybe just spend a few minutes looking at a game you’ve got that you don’t love, or that doesn’t suit your requirements right at this moment, and see whether that sparks any ideas for new ways to play or totally different games that you could create with the same pieces. Maybe you want to make a social distancing game in the Cluedo mansion, moving around as quickly as possible without getting too close to anyone else. Maybe that’s all a bit much right now, and you want to use the Monopoly board as a prompt for inventing adventures out in the world. Maybe you want something totally abstract, using Scrabble tiles not even as letters but just as shapes, mixtures of curved and straight lines. Maybe you’ll come up with something amazing. There’s a good chance you won’t, of course - to be honest not all the Boardgame Remix Kit games are bangers, despite four professional game designers and a load of playtesters giving it their best. But maybe the process of inventing a game and trying it out will be fun anyway.