Cryptozoic Entertainment knows they have a unique opportunity with Ghostbusters: The Board Game, and they’re trying to make certain they don’t screw it up.
While it seems that recently gamers have been unplugging themselves more often to play tabletop games, there’s still a huge section of people that haven’t played a board game since they were kids. Ghostbusters is such a huge and beloved franchise, however, that they feel that this could be a massive crossover hit, the perfect way to get people into the hobby. The Kickstarter success it’s already seen- 100% funded in a little over a day- certainly seems to indicate this.
I spoke with Cryptozoic Creative Director Adam Sblendorio at last week’s Toy Fair about the game and he felt confident that their focus on a cooperative experience was going to help not only make for a enjoyable time, but bring new gamers into the fold.
“Ghostbusters is something that we really hope will bring people into the tabletop world,” says Sblendorio. “We don’t want to scare them off with competitive gameplay because there’s 350 million people who have not heard of Catan or Carcasonne, the ones that have become seemingly mainstream. I know you’re a preacher to the choir. We know you get tabletop games, but there’s still a lot of people who don’t know about this world.”
“Unlike music, where if you had a favorite band that got big and people accused them of selling out, I feel like the tabletop community wants the opposite. They want more people playing.”
He could be right, and if so, Cryptozoic and their many licenses is in a unique position to help this along. They see Ghostbusters as their chance to draw in this new audience and be a crossover hit, easy enough to get into but offering enough challenges and fun to retain board game vets’ interest.
This means that you really have to work at hard at capturing the ghosts and running back to the Ecto-1 to dump them off. If you do that they go back to where they came from and give the team more time to accomplish their objectives for that mission.
The many different scenarios do seem like they’ll offer much in the way of replayability, but will it appeal to the hardcore tabletop crowd?
“There are so many awesome game companies that are very, very good at what they do,” says Sblendorio, “and we can try to be one of those too, but honestly how much room is there? Or, we can be the company that’s trying to get more people to discover these games.”
“One of the reasons for doing the Kickstarter was we got so much more coverage doing it this way. If we solicited it our normal way, people would get excited and stores would carry it but nothing this big.”
“I know what people say about licenses, that they’re sloppy or money grabs, but they really aren’t,” says Sblendorio, “I grew up playing every licensed video game. Remember games like Total Recall? They were terrible. But we think we do it pretty well.”
“For The Walking Dead, people started watching that show who would never would have watched a zombie show before, and all of a sudden maybe someone who wouldn’t have ever played a tabletop game before might try our game since they like these characters, and if they like it then you show them further games. We want to champion the cause, and this is the best way we can do it. ”
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Thanks to the Cryptozoic team for their time. You still have time to become a backer of Ghostbusters: The Board Game on Kickstarter.
