Board Game Distress Challenge - Final Thoughts

I’ve always been intrigued by stories in which a board game (or some other tabletop game) has played a significant role.  Now, I want to make it clear that I’m talking about more here than players simply playing a game, even for very high stakes, even as high as life and death.  I’m talking about a game being at least a part of the main character’s reality.

One of my earliest memories of this comes from the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll.  In the first book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice shrinks down in size and interacts with several playing cards.  In the second book, Through the Looking Glass, Alice again shrinks down in size and interacts with chess pieces, in a world shaped like a chessboard.  In Jumanji, the characters start a game of Jumanji, only for the events in the game to start happening in the real world.  Another example is a scene in a Harry Potter book in which Harry, Ron and Hermione take the part of three pieces in a life-sized game of chess.  I have vague memories of several other books using similar ideas as well.

As I’ve been writing Damsel in Distress stories on DeviantArt for quite a few years now, it may seem odd that I had never written a full-length story combining a board game and distress.  This is especially surprising as many board games feature capturing, which can easily be turned into a distress scene.  But, no, I’d only every touched on it a couple times when writing drabbles.  I felt it was finally time to create a proper length story with those elements.  Thanks to support I received from a couple people, I developed enough ideas that I felt I could finally proceed with such a project.

To celebrate this, I decided to hold a Board Game Distress Challenge, in which I invited other members of DeviantArt to try their hand at combining DiD, board games, and art or literature.  I was overwhelmed with the response, with the following ten people submitting a piece for my challenge:

  A big thank you to all of you!  I was very impressed by the imagination you all displayed in creating your entries!  When I announced my challenge, I indicated that this was not a contest, and that I would not announce a winner.  That turned out to be a good decision, since I certainly could not select one winner from this group.  If you would like to see the entries for yourself, I invite you to come by my page, where I have thumbnails of them all in a special widget devoted to this challenge.

In addition to the one story I planned when I created this challenge, I later wrote another.  If I might be allowed to include my own two creations in the final listing of challenge entries, that gives us twelve deviations covering ten different board games.  In alphabetical order, they are:

Battleship

Beware the Bog

Candyland

Chess

Clue (Cluedo)

Game of Life

Monopoly

Mousetrap

Stratego

Words with Friends

I find it quite remarkable that people found such a variety of scenarios amongst so many games, which use very different gameplay mechanics.  Again, well done to everyone who participated!

It would be nice to run another challenge like this one day, once again offering a separate journal for every entry I receive.  Still, I realize people have other projects they wish to work on, so such a thing will have to wait.  Besides, I would have to think up a new theme for it!  Perhaps if people are still receptive to the idea, I can try it again next summer.