From Dejarik to Nukem to Tri-Dimensional Chess, here’s our celebration of the finest fictional games in film and TV…
“There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles,” William S Burroughs once wrote, “but ours seems to be based on war and games.” And as this list aims to prove, war and games are a common sight in the universes created by the finest geek writers in film and TV.
Whether they require a dice, board and counters, or a weirdly shaped pack of cards, the entries below represent a few of the fictional games that have popped up on the large and small screen over the past few decades. Bear in mind we’re not talking about future sports here (something we’ll hold back for another list further down the line) or made-up videogames. No, these are the kinds of games you could theoretically play with your family after Sunday lunch, or with your friends over a beer on a Friday night. That is, if you can even figure out how to play them…
Nukem
As seen in: RoboCop
“That’s it, buster! No more military aid!” The appearance of this fictional board game may have been brief, but its cynical, blackly comic atmosphere perfectly sums up both the attitude of RoboCop’s makers, and also the 80s era it sprang from. Possibly a futuristic, computer-enhanced combination of Battleship and Risk, Nukem is the must-have family board game for the late Cold War era – a kill-or-be-killed nuclear stand-off that inevitably ends in Armageddon.
With a few of the other fictional games on this list eventually becoming material reality, we’re a little saddened that some enterprising soul never came up with a real-world version of Nukem. All we can do is gaze longingly at its advert for the umpteenth time and wistfully mutter, “We’d buy that for a dollar…”
Tall Card
As seen in: Firefly
As the above entries prove, you can’t very well create a sci-fi television series without also coming up with its own arcane pastime, and Tall Card is, in the universe of Joss Whedon’s Firefly, the poker-like card game of choice – though exactly what the rules are is anyone’s guess. Tall Card’s briefly seen in the episode, Shindig, where Simon hosts a game to decide who’ll carry out various boring chores. “Plums are tall,” he says, mysteriously. “No tall card claim.”
Writer Jane Espenson briefly got everyone’s hopes up when she claimed that a full list of Tall Card’s rules were available on Fox’s website – something that later turned out to be a false alarm. Firefly fans are endlessly inventive, though, and some have managed to piece together their own version of Tall Card based on its brief cameo in the series. This means that, with the help of an inkjet printer and a pair of scissors, you too can use Tall Card to decide who will do the washing up, hoovering or septic tank cleansing.
Double Cranko
As seen in: M*A*S*H
A mixture of draughts, chess, poker and drinking game, Double Cranko appeared in the M*A*S*H episode, Your Hit Parade in 1978. It’s a game so unfathomable that even its inventors, Hawkeye and Captain Hunnicutt, aren’t sure of its rules, as Colonel Potter soon discovers. “Is that in the rules?” Potter asks, when he spots Hawkeye pulling off a strange manoeuvre, to which Hunnicutt replies, “What rules?”
Jumanji
As seen in: Jumanji
Jumanji’s an obvious choice, really, given that the whole film’s based around the enchanted board game of the title. And if this 1995 family movie’s taught us anything, it’s that board games where the pieces can miraculously move themselves should be avoided at all costs – unless you’re a fan of jungle animals, that is. As Jumanji’s protagonists find out, playing the game will unleash all kinds of wild creatures, zany special effects and Robin Williams.
The popularity of Jumanji spawned a proper board game courtesy of Milton Bradley, which replicated the riddles and look of the film without the rampaging animals. Zathura, a sort-of-sequel to Jumanji from the same writer, didn’t do well enough to spawn a tie-in board game of its own.
Dejarik
As seen in: Star Wars
If you’d like to know how dull life was in the 80s, before the invention of the Internet and such, here’s a taster: my friends and I would often talk excitedly about Dejarik, the game Chewbacca and R2-D2 are seen playing aboard the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. It’s essentially a circular variant of chess, where holographic creatures fight tooth and claw for control of the board.
I suppose, like almost everything in Star Wars and its sequels, Dejarik looked like the kind of thing a kid of the 80s would want in their bedroom, which is probably why the game, although only making a cameo appearance in Star Wars, repeatedly turned up in tie-in novels, videogames and episodes of The Clone Wars.
The enduring power of Dejarik is such that, years later, some dedicated fans have come up with the rules for their own version of the game, one American company created a scale model version of the board and its little fighting creatures (now sold out), and there are even open-source versions of it available to download, if you’re prepared to search for them.
Sadly, the ultimate toy we’ve been waiting for since childhood – a proper, full-size version of Dejarik with actual holographic monsters – remains elusive. We’ll just have to carry on doing the same thing we’ve been doing for the last 20 years: setting up some He-Man figures on a round coffee table and pretending the dog’s Chewbacca.
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