Occasionally we feature a post from our friends at The Malted Meeple. Their Above the Table series covers discussions of all things gaming related. This column also gives the Meeple bloggers a thinly veiled excuse to occasionally wax philosophical and indulge in some hopefully entertaining navel gazing. 

Video games are big business! According to Fortune, video game revenue in 2015 reached $23.5 billion. Video games are so big that their sphere of influence seems never ceasing. Even the board gaming community is being affected by video games. The influence comes as no surprise considering there is a good chance someone who likes to play board games will also enjoy playing video games. Although that may not always be the case, many companies are betting on it to be true. One example of such influence is a game called Dark Souls.

Dark Souls is in my opinion one of the greatest video game series released in the past decade. It is a unique and punishing action RPG experience, known for causing its players to shed sweat and tears over its daunting challenges. Recently a UK based publisher, Steamforged Games, submitted a board game version of Dark Souls to Kickstarter and it was an enormous success. Over 31,000 backers pledged £3,771,474 (nearly $5,000,000) to the project’s campaign; successfully funding the project.

People who have played the test copy of Dark Souls remark on how well it ports from the video game universe to the board game universe. In the board game version, the player must learn the behavior of the enemies they encounter. This allows them to reduce damage from the enemy’s attack, and also to recognize opportunities to defeat the boss. As in the video game version, players must also manage their health and stamina resources. This resource management component should be very familiar to the board game community.

One of the observations of the video to board relationship is the degree of translation in the relationship. While creating the game the developer can pursue completely original mechanics and only embrace the theme of the game, or they can attempt to place some of the mechanics from the video game into the board game. With Dark Souls, the creators took the mechanic of requiring players to learn enemy behavior and made it a major part of their game. Other board games based on video games have been created without any common systems or mechanics, and focused entirely on the lore of the source game.

Read much more about Dark Souls and the video game/board game relationship on the Meeple Moments blog.