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Frankenstein The Board Game
You have been abandoned. The site of your grotesque form has caused your creator to flee, leaving you all alone. You have no skills. You are unable to read or write, and thus you are unable to communicate. You are also unable to use your new body to move successfully about. You can however attain these skills so you can find your creator. Only then will he accept you. It is your quest to be accepted, to abandon solitude and become loved.
What if Mary Shelley were a game designer?
Other than being a book, I think Frankenstein would work great as a board game. Packing all of the characters and themes into one board game would be nearly impossible so I chose to only include a few. Acceptance, loneliness, and the desire to attain something more than what you were given to you by your creator in the beginning, were themes that could fit nicely into one game.
Players take the part of monsters searching for their creator. By attaining all of the necessary skills on their quest, the monsters will then be accepted by their creator. Set before the players is a game board with a few different types of landscapes, in each landscape there is a town where a specific skill can be obtained. First there is Geneva, a small town where the monsters can learn their motor-skills to aid them on their quest. Then there are The Alps where the monsters can become knowledgeable and more apt to pick up other skills on their journey. Next there are the woods, hidden in the woods is another small town where the monsters can learn a language. The plains are the last landscape where a small village can teach them how to interact with others using the language they learned.
In the book, Frankenstein always seems to be running from the monster he had created. By calling a game board piece the creator, the idea of the piece moving by the roll of a die or draw of a card could act as a nice element. A player could have attained all of their skills and is closing in on their creator only to find out they had just missed him. By giving other players the ability to move this piece when they so chose could serve as excellent sabotage element or a players life line.
With the environment pretty much established and the main objective defined, a way to move around the board would need to be decided. At the beginning of each players turn they would draw a card from the deck and roll two dice. On the card would give the player specific commodities like, meat, or bread, or corn. Rolling the dice would tell the player how many steps to go forward. All along the player is trying to get to a town to learn a skill. If a player rolls a six, but a town is 5 steps away, they would miss the town but would take 1 card from the deck, if they rolled a seven, they would take two cards from the deck and so on and so forth. The resources the players get do account for something. When a player finally does reach a town, they will need commodities to trade for a desired skill.
Some towns may require two ears of corn, and a pound of meat for a skill while villages may just want a loaf of bread. Now the creator piece comes into use. If a player has three of each commodity they can either keep them or use them to bait Frankenstein out from hiding and trick him into trading with someone whom he thinks is just a regular trader with a lot to trade. This tactic can be used to thwart a player from winning or it can be used to a players advantage. If a player has all of the skills needed, they can then use those cards to bring the creator to them so they can seek his acceptance.
