Ever since the invention of the board game, mankind has invented a vast number of them. Most of them could just as easily be played on paper or on a computer. For example, Chess, Checkers, and Go have no elements of randomness and so they could even be played verbally if the players’ visual memories were good enough. Some require the roll of a die or dice in order to make decisions, but are otherwise deterministic. For example, Axis and Allies or Monopoly translate well into digital versions.
Then there’s a whole other class of game that relies on real-world physics to operate. Sure, there are non-board games like basketball where it’s expected that physics plays a role, but it really fascinates me that a game of Fireball Island would play out differently on the moon than it would here on earth. In zero-gravity environments, several games come to mind that would be completely unplayable. The poster child of “relies on physics to operate” is of course Mouse Trap, which is arguably unplayable anyway, but it probably takes a pretty narrow range of gravitational acceleration to successfully go through the whole chain of traps from start to end. Hell, I could only get it to work about 50% of the time anyway. Games where things roll around a lot like Crossfire or Hungry Hungry Hippos would probably end up with a lot of balls flying off the table if you tried to play them on the moon. Dominoes would be boring at best.
Hypothetically, in the distant future when the economy spans multiple planets, games such as these would be difficult to design. Gravity is such an intrinsic part of our interaction with the world that I can’t even begin to imagine how the board game industry would cope with it being variable. Chess, however, is a game you can play anywhere.
