If you scan the shelves of your local board game store, any number of well-known video game adaptations will likely leap out at you. There’s Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz for example, or Slay the Spire: The Board Game, alongside many other board games based on video games. But one very well-known name you won’t see is that of Lara Croft, or her beloved Tomb Raider franchise. For the series’ legions of fans, that is all about to change, but not necessarily in the way that they might think.
“We wanted to create a solo board game where Lara Croft is on a new adventure,” Luke Meila, designer of the upcoming Tomb Raider: The Crypt of Chronos, explained to IGN at his stand at the UK Games Expo, boldly supported by a hirsute gentleman cosplaying as Lara Croft. “We’ve seen Lara in video games, movies, comics and her adventures are always tailored to whatever the medium is, so that’s what we did with this: make a board game as if Lara has always been in a board game.”
That’s the core conceit driving the unusual solo nature of the game, which Melia feels is a pretty bold decision. “There are lots of franchises that create one-player modes in their board game adaptations, but we’ve never seen one build a complete solo game,” he continued. “While there are some great solo games like Under Fallen Skies and Final Girl, there’s nothing with a license this big. I was worried someone would get cold feet and pressure us into turning this into a more traditional multiplayer game.”
Luckily, that didn’t happen, and Melia has been free to realize his vision in the form of a game with two different ways to play. “There’s the adventure book, which is fifteen structured missions,” he said. “It’s designed to tell the story of how Lara got to the island of Kairos and what she’s looking for there. It kind of teaches you how to play, using a minimal set of components.”
Once you’re familiar with that, you can move onto campaign play. “This is much more of an open world, much more expansive” said Melia. This involves moving Lara across a map of the whole island, with different terrain hexes divided into jungles, deserts, mountains and tombs. “Each of the tombs has a token on it, and one of those tokens hides a map, while another hides a key,” he added. "When you get both, you’ll gain access to your big final mission.”
Each hex on the map has you drawing a card which shows you how to set up a level to play through, built from modular tiles supplied in the box. Traversing this has its own set of challenges depending on the terrain. “Jungles are quite balanced,” Melia said. “Deserts are hot and dangerous, wide open spaces that require a lot of traversal and enemies can see you from far away. Tombs are more puzzle-based with fewer enemies.”
Putting puzzles in board games has always been a double-edged sword. Puzzling and strategy feel like very close bedfellows, but once you’ve solved a puzzle, there’s little point in doing it again, making your game obsolete. Melia has found an ingenious way to get around this problem by making parts of each puzzle highly dynamic.
“So in this tomb we have to collect an artifact, which is locked behind a door,” he demonstrated. “We've got a boulder that you have to push around and you've got to try and work out how to get to the artifacts. So you need to work out where to put the boulder to get access to the unlocked corridors, and work out the correct order to throw the switches. There are twelve different tombs in the game, with different maps, different objectives and different switches. That would be a lot to try and memorize.”
And even if you do, Melia has designed things so that the game will keep on throwing you curveballs. “How each tomb plays out is going to be different on each replay,” he continued. “The events are going to be different, the enemies are going to be different. You’ll create a plan at the beginning of each tomb, but you have to continually adjust that plan according to what’s going on around you. You might learn where to push a boulder but that will be complicated if an enemy wanders into the area.”
He’s spent a surprising amount of time ensuring that his invention continues to puzzle even experienced players. “I experimented with all kinds of different puzzle options because having stale solutions was exactly my worry,” he confessed. “I wanted this to be endlessly replayable. But we’ve done a lot of playtesting and so far we’ve not had an issue where someone has done the same tomb twice and it’s not felt different each time. There’s enough variation in there to throw you off, whatever your plan is.”
Outside of tombs, you’re faced with more traditional challenges such as jumping, sneaking, and fighting, which are handled with a palette of six different actions and a pool of six dice that you can spend to boost your action. “ You can use as many dice as you want on an action and the more you use, the more powerful it is,” said Melia. “However, once you've used all six, your turn is done. If I want to run across the board, I could roll four dice for movement, but then if I find myself in a combat situation, it only leaves me with two.”
Once you’re out of dice, the enemies get to react. “They move on patrol routes,” Melia said. “Unless you’ve created noise in which case they’ll go and investigate and if they see you, they’ll attack. Then there’s an event phase where you’ll draw a card. There are lots of different kinds, like a dart trap you’ll have to try and dodge, or enemies spawning onto the board, or bonus resources. As you uncover resources, you can use them to craft new weapons and new outfits, and new actions as well.”
In the campaign game, enemies don’t just spawn and move in the level you’re playing but on the island map as well. “On the island enemies are NATLA, one of the famous villains from the Tomb Raider games,” Melia revealed. “Their invasion is spreading across the island, and every time you run out of event cards, more and more will appear. So if you draw helpful events like bonuses, they’re out of the deck and the game gets harder because enemies appear more frequently.”
Individual missions take about 20 to 60 minutes, so it can take a while to play through the 15 scenarios in the adventure mode. But, happily, the campaign missions are a bit shorter, allowing you to fit the whole thing into an evening’s play, which takes about three hours. However, the game has still been designed so you can “save” it in the midst of a campaign if you so wish. “We’ve included a save box,” says Melia. “You put in what you’ve crafted and it tells you how to save the decks.”
Video game adaptations to tabletop always face a barrier of how far to replicate the twitch action of the screen to the more sedate pace of the table. That’s why Melia tried to focus on the puzzling aspects of the franchise, but he made sure to try and make taking actions in the game feel like those of the original as much as possible. “You climb up to different levels of terrain in the game,” he explained. “Originally, I made moving and climbing two separate actions, with a roll to climb, because that’s how it works in the video game. You stop in front of the wall, jump and then climb up. But it just wasn’t fun on the tabletop, it got in the way of itself. We made them into one fluid action and it costs movement points to climb up and down.”
There are lots of other subtle nods to the original experience, too. “There’s a cooperative mode called pass the controller,” Melia said. “You take the dice, take a turn and then pass it to the other player. My wife and I play together quite a lot and we make joint decisions on what Lara is doing. It’s great until Lara gets surrounded by enemies and we disagree on how to get her out!”
And after months of design work and internal testing, Melia, who admits to being a devotee of the series from the very first game, finally got to try it out with some fellow fans. “They said it felt like an authentic Tomb Raider experience,” he beamed. “During one puzzle, one of them said that it couldn’t be done. That it was impossible. And I didn’t say anything, I just watched him reverse engineer it until finally I saw it click, and he smiled and solved it. And that was excellent.”
There can’t be many finer moments for a game designer, nor a player who loves the series, and it won’t be long before you get the chance to experience it on your own tabletop, too.
Matt Thrower is a contributing freelance writer for IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can reach him on BlueSky at @mattthr.bsky.social.
