The 7 Best Movies & Shows About Board Games
In the power rankings of Hollywood IP, video game adaptations have been giving superhero movies a run for their money lately—think Minecraft, Sonic, The Last of Us—but toys and games might not be too far behind. If production slates at Hasbro and Mattel are to be believed, either one has the potential to dominate cinema screens in the next few years, which is good news for fans of some of the world’s most popular tabletop and card-based games.
In the aftermath of Barbie’s world-conquering success, plans were quickly put in place to bring Polly Pocket, Rock-em, Sock-em Robots, View-Master, and, god help us, Furby, to the big screen. Tabletop and card-based board games—with their intricate rules and their reliance on a player’s imagination—have always been a trickier prospect, but that hasn’t stopped studios from trying over the years.
Below is a list of seven movies that have, in their own ways, attempted to visualise the unique joys of tabletop and card-based games. Read on to discover more and use the guide below to find them on Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
We’ll start things off with a movie that is, to the best of my knowledge, the first to be directly based on and named after a classic board game. Jonathan Lynn’s Clue (or Cluedo, to UK viewers), from 1985, included everything from the game’s characters—Professor Plum, Ms Scarlet and Colonel Mustard all feature—to its classic murder weapons to make a film that worked as both an enjoyable murder mystery and a campy homage to the game.
If you’ve been enjoying Rian Johnson’s Knives Out trilogy and are partial to some Tim Curry (think The Rocky Horror Picture Show), you’ll probably have a blast with it.
Now more than 30 years since its release, we can probably state with some confidence that Jumanji was the most influential board game movie of the 20th century—although, given the lack of competition, I suppose that doesn’t say a lot. The movie was actually based on a popular picture book by Chris Van Allsburg, but the movie was so convincing that it made a whole generation of kids believe that the game really existed.
From the closeups of rolling dice to the eerie way that the pieces moved, no movie had dramatised the board game experience with so much dramatic flair before. The recent Dwayne Johnson-led reboots have been perfectly fun, but thanks to its mix of practical effects, CGI, and Robin Williams, Joe Johnston’s 1995 original still works a charm.
No, you didn’t dream it: Rihanna and Liam Neeson really costarred in 2012’s Battleship—a movie unironically based on the board game of the same name. This is the one where a group of Naval officers off the coast of Hawaii are forced to use a decommissioned WWII ship (the actual USS Missouri) to fend off an alien invasion.
The origins of the iconic plastic board game can be traced back to pencil-and-paper versions that began to circulate during WWI, which makes director Peter Berg’s decision to include an alien invasion in his adaptation all the funnier. Imagine a mix of the uber-glossy and uber-silly blockbusters of the early 2010s (think Transformers: Dark of the Moon) and Berg’s later films (like Deepwater Horizon), and you’ll know what to expect.
2014’s Ouija (and its sequel, Origin of Evil) might seem closer to the world of tarot cards than commercial board games, but Hasbro genuinely holds the right to that name and has been producing these allegedly satanic objects since the early 1990s.
Nevertheless, this 2014 horror movie, directed by Stiles White, naturally leans into the board’s potential for channelling and conversing with spirits. The movie is far from a classic, but it was Olivia Cooke’s last role before breaking out in Me, Earl and the Dying Girl in 2015—so if you’re a fan of the actress’s work in that movie, or in the more recent House of the Dragon, you might be interested in checking it out.
Norihiro Koizumi’s Chihayafuru is a live-action adaptation of a popular Japanese manga and anime of the same name. The story follows a girl named Chihaya as she enters the world of competitive Karuta, a traditional card game that is said to test a player’s wits and memory as well as their knowledge of Japanese poetry—and as you may have guessed, there is no obvious Western comparison to it.
The anime and movie do their best to visualise the game’s dramatic stakes, but it’s best viewed as a coming-of-age tale for Chihayafuru—imagine Haikyu!! meets A Silent Voice, and you’ll have a vague idea.
Cast your mind back to the early days of COVID-19, and you, like everyone else, were probably living on a strict diet of Tiger King, Normal People and The Queen’s Gambit. In case you haven’t seen it, this is a show about an American chess prodigy who overcomes institutional sexism and fears of nuclear annihilation to rise up through the ranks and become an international star.
The show was an absolute sensation at the time and cemented Anya Taylor-Joy as a rising star in Hollywood—so if you liked her performances in movies like Furiosa and The Menu, you’ll wanna see it.
After a few failed attempts from other directors, John Francis Daley and Johnathan Goldstein did Dungeons & Dragons justice with Honor Among Thieves—a hugely entertaining movie that captured the game’s playful charms.
This is a movie that manages to earnestly communicate the game’s inventive joys while not taking itself too seriously in the process. If you’re a D&D head or simply enjoy all things Chris Pine (Star Trek and Wonder Woman especially), you’re gonna dig it.
