by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

One of my most vivid moviegoing memories involves my dad taking me to the little stripmall multiplex down the street from our house. I have a lot of memories from the Dickinson Olathe Landing 8 Theater, but this one is as vivid as anything else kicking around in my brain. Walking to our theater, my dad pointed at the placard for Biodome above a theater we are passing, and I was like, “I didn’t even know Biodome was on the table.” Because we are making our way to see Jumanji for the fifth time, because it was 1995, I was 9 years old, and Jumanji was the greatest piece of cinema I had ever set my eyes upon. 

If case you were never a young lad primed for the preeminent family friendly adventure movie of the mid-90s, Jumanji is a movie about a boy who discovers a mystical/magical safari-themed board game, gets SUCKED INTO THE GAME, and becomes trapped there until a couple kids stumble across it decades later. The kid, now a full-grown Robin Williams, must help the children navigate their way through the game as it starts to overtake their reality. Elephants and rhinos charge through their house and into the streets. A localized tornado destroys the living room. Some poorly CGIed monkeys steal a police cruiser and go on a joy ride! The premise is incredibly elegant. Based on the 1981 children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg, the film has a dreamlike quality and the sort of life or death stakes that you just don’t get in kid’s movies these days. There is true peril, and that’s probably why I went to the theater to watch it over and over again and why it was my #1 favorite movie until Men in Black came out two years later.

One of the coolest things about Jumanji though was the tie-in board game that came along with it. For an avid Jumanji film fan, this was basically the greatest thing that had ever happened to me in my young life. You probably think this is all leading up to me telling you how my love of the Jumanji tie-in game made me a lifelong tabletop gamer, but you’d be wrong. Outside of the errant game of Scrabble or Clue, games really weren’t a big part of my upbringing. And yet when I was hired as a teen services librarian at the Kansas City Public Library in my late 20s, when the cool teen librarians roped me into helping them with their teen tabletop gaming programming initiative, I jumped at the opportunity. I spent the next six months learning all about all of these complex tabletop games I had heard of, but my only frame of reference was the “Cones of Dunshire” episode of Parks & Recreation. I was fascinated, but the barrier for entry (read: SO MANY RULES) felt like it would be too much for my sad little brain.

It wasn’t, and I became obsessed, and the resulting teen tabletop gaming program I rolled out at the branch where I worked was the most professionally satisfying experience of my life. Every Tuesday night, a bunch of 12-15 year olds would roll into the library and I’d show them how to play Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Takenoko, King of Tokyo, and all of my other favorites. It was very much my “I can’t believe they are paying me to do this” moment. When I left that job for a position across state lines, lo and behold, I found that they had a family tabletop gaming program and I jumped into that before I was even finished with orientation. The program even continued through the pandemic, where we utilized a service called Board Game Arena which provided digital versions of basically every game you would want to play. Tabletop gaming is a niche hobby, but the people who do it are the passionate sort who will find a way to keep gaming even when one of the core selling point (read: sitting in a room with your friends and trying everything you can to ruin those friendships by letting your deep dark competitive demon show its head…or is that just me?) is, pardon the pun, off the table. 

As much as I like to think that I am “with it,” tabletop games have been having a bit of a moment since…right about the time I started getting into them, which makes me think my being hipped to that wonderful world is more of a zeitgeist moment than some sort of hardcore fandom on my part. That was right around when the 2018 Jason Bateman/Rachel McAdams comedy Game Night came out, with the premise of a couple’s regularly hosted game night devolving into a real-life murder mystery (or is it?). I felt seen! There, on the screen, beautiful Hollywood people playing tabletop gaming nerds! What a world! Sure, tabletop games still get trolled on for being overly complicated (See: that aforementioned Parks & Rec bit), but thanks to Stranger Things–-a show that explicitly uses Dungeons & Dragons as its narrative engine–we’re getting another Dungeons & Dragons movie this Friday in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and early buzz suggests it’s at the very, very least, going to be a whole lot better than the Jeremy Irons-starring Dungeons & Dragons movie from 2000. OK, low bar, but at least looks like it is going to be a whole hell of a lot of fun, which is something that Y2K D&D decidedly wasn’t. 

People play games for the same reason they watch movies: escapism. And yet Tabletop-to-Big Screen adaptations have been pretty putrid up until very recently. With the exception of Clue, most of these tend to be cynical cash-ins on existing intellectual properties because the producers were too lazy to put in the actual work. Stuff like Battleship feels like it sets a precedent where you can just point to any random brand in your house and say, “Let’s make a movie about that.” More recently there was the horror movie Ouija, which suffered from the same laziness as Battleship. Can it really be that hard to create a compelling story based on an IP with no inherent story? Gore Verbinski managed it with that first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, but it’s hard to recall another movie that sounded unbelievably dumb on paper that didn’t end up being unbelievably dumb on the screen.

Which is why, Hollywood, I am going to give you some FREE ideas for some board game based movies that will, as long as you don’t cut too many corners, become box office triumphs and surefire Oscar contenders.

The Color of Monopoly Money
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Rated R for Pervasive Strong Language, Adult Situations, and Pervasive Drug Use

Rich Uncle Pennybags (Daniel Day Lewis) runs the Boardwalk with an iron fist. When a hot young real estate agent Ms. Monopoly (Zendaya) starts scooping up properties when Atlantic City’s real estate market crashes, Pennybags vows to defend his ruthless grip on the city by any means necessary, not limited to destroying everything Ms. Monopoly holds dear. Do pass go, dip into the Community Chest, and take a Chance on this scintillating tale of greed and lust.

Guillermo Del Toro’s Candy Land
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro
Rated R for Intense Graphic Violence, Disturbing Thematic Material, and Graphic Nudity

Two children escaping Pinochet’s Chile stumble upon a magical world made of candy. They must make their way through Peppermint Pass, wade through Licorice Lagoon, and scale Chocolate Mountain in their efforts to find the elusive King Kandy who is the only one who can help them return home. But do they want to go home, or is it safer to live as citizens of Candy Land? Doug Jones plays King Kandy, Mr. Mint, Duke of Swirl, as well as the two children looking to find their way back home. 

Ticket to Ride: Off the Rails
Directed by Justin Lin
Rated PG-13 for Intense Non-Stop Action and Pervasive Opium Use

Fast and Furious franchise director Justin Lin travels back in time to the early 1900s where a series of wealthy railroad barons (Vin Diesel, The Rock, Jason Statham, and who are we kidding, the rest of the Fast and Furious family) traverse the country claiming as many open railroad lines as possible. We don’t want to spoil too much, but at one point Vin Diesel ramps a train over a steamship. Don’t ask us how! It’s the movies. Choo, choo, choose this caper this Friday only in theaters. 

Connect Four
Directed by Werner Herzog
Rated R for Intense Scenes of War and Carnage, Strong Language, and Disturbing Thematic Material

Mr. Red and Mr. Yellow are locked in a state of endless warfare. For centuries they have waged war, angling for the elusive four-in-a-row. But who is really pulling the strings? Can Mr. Red and Mr. Yellow put their mutually assured destruction aside and break free of the endless struggle, or will this just be 180 minutes (you heard me) of checker pieces falling to their inevitable doom? Herzog himself plays Mr. Red and an AI deepfake of Klaus Kinski plays Mr. Yellow.

Scrabble
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Rated PG-13 for Brief Strong Language and Violence

Wiseman’s latest fly-on-the-wall documentary is just 8 hours of people playing Scrabble. At one point there is a dispute about whether or not a word is actually a real word and it is the most exciting thing that happens in this movie. We won’t tell you what the word is, you’ll have to tune into PBS this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to find out.