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Are there any fun board games based on arcade games?

I know there is a Frogger game and a Defender one. Thought I'd get a couple of this kind on eBay but wonder if there is any you recommend?

Also, of potential interest, board games based on 80s/90s video game classics, like early Zelda.

BoardGameGeek has a category for them, but the only one I might have played is Q*bert (in which case it didn't make a good impression).

Kind of cool to see there was a Makaimura game. I don't really know anything about Japanese board gaming outside of shogi & sugoroku.

I have the Pac Man and Genpei Toumaden boardgames. Never played them though.

For those who missed it, Board James had an episode on this very subject. They're very not good. The worst.

You know how the boardgame scene these days is jam packed with enthusiast designers? And often the only way to pick up one these monstrosities that bend the limits of tabletop to almost playing a computer game, is to buy them during a print run on Kickblaster? The exact opposite of that.

No boxes with 28 pounds of cardboard for your giant AI murder-tank like in the OGRE reprint.

Someone should do a Garegga board game. With rank and hidden ship types.

Minzoku picked up a boardgame based on Gradius. We've yet to actually try playing it though. It includes 4 little plastic Vic Vipers and a cardboard Big Core (with a slider to show damage).

Thanks for the link! I missed that one. There's a bunch of them at least.


Funny episode! That Super Mario Bros board game seemed so boring and stupid I kind of want it.



"You missed a medal! Go back 10 spaces."

"An invincible bullet hit you. Skip next turn."

"An invincible bullet hit you AND you missed a medal. Go back 10 spaces and skip next turn."

"Flamingoes are flying from the castle. Roll 5 dice and get 5 sixes. Otherwise, restart."

"Rank is high. Kill yourself."

"Congrats! You have beaten the last boss and shall enter your initials. Roll the 3 letter dice. If you get 'YGW' you win. Otherwise, restart."

In the before times, there was a cafe I used to go to that would let you play the Pac Man board game (a mint copy too). As a kid I had Pac Man and Zaxxon. Zaxxon was pretty wacky, with telescopic game peices that could be positioned to be flying high or low like in the arcade.

When I was a kid, the neighbours' daughter, who was about the same age as me, had the Pac Man board game. I remember playing it once or twice with her. It was actually quite a good translation of the source material into board game mechanics. I wonder if the other ones from the same batch of licensing (there was at least a DK one, I seem to remember) were equally well thought out.

I used to play the Pac-Man one quite a bit when I was younger. I loved how it came with a bunch of marbles for dots. I also had a card game that was for younger children and not as fun.

A more recent product, inspired by the golden age of consoles without specific licenses: "8-bit Box", with very funny components (like a console-shaped box and cardboard "controllers") and several games packaged as "cartridges".
There's a fun multiplayer cooperative Pacman-like game (the ghosts try to corner Pacman), a rather disappointing beat'em up (queues of enemies represented as a deck of cards) with cumbersome, unclear and shallow rules, and others I haven't tried (a futuristic racing game and a suite of sport minigames).

At the age I was at the time, these were more of a "playset" than a game. Zaxxon was especially good for this as it included some walls to design bunkers full of defenses, and flying the jets in high/low positions.

I've had Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros and Q-Bert. It was always neat that the playing pieces can gobble up all the dots just by landing on them.

OutRun one could at least look nice.

I recall browsing the local toy stores back in the early 1980s with the Milton Bradley board games based on the popular arcade game titles of Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Defender, Centipede, Berzerk, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Zaxxon and Turbo. I recall getting the Milton Bradley board game of Zaxxon as an X-Mas gift one year and still have it to this very day. This was before Hasbro ended up buying Milton Bradley outright and bring that famous brand name under it's own banner.

On a related note, Tomy of America got into the Pac-Man craze with it's Pac-Man Magnetic Maze game circa 1982 (that pre-dates the Atari Games version of Pac-Mania that debuted in the arcades back in 1987 by a mere 5 years!) complete with a real arcade joystick that would tilt the maze board itself as the 3-D Pac-Man character would slide down the maze and gobble the fruit bonuses strewn throughout the maze whilst dodging the two ghosts.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~