There are two The Shining-based board games, which we’ll be taking a look at over the next couple of posts, starting with Mixlore’s The Shining (2020). Both this game and the other one we’ll be looking at (Coded Chronicle’s Escape From the Overlook Hotel) are notably adapted from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film version of The Shining rather than King’s novel, though the challenges of navigating the Overlook Hotel remain a common central conflict in King’s novel, Kubrick’s film, and these board games, highlighting the spatial navigation of this contested space and how consumers experience it, whether through the written word, moving images, or a physical game board laid out in front of them. 

When it comes to the multiple meanings and contested intersections of space in the Overlook Hotel, the board for Mixlore’s The Shining game initially feels a bit simplistic, with just a handful of significant locations: the kitchen, the Gold Room, the office, the Colorado Room, the hedge maze, Room 237, and the caretaker’s apartment. The layout of the board is straightforward: a bottom row of ground floor-level rooms (the kitchen, Gold Room, office, Colorado Room, and hedge maze), with stairs and that legendary blood-filled elevator connecting the ground floor level with two upper-floor rooms (Room 237 and the caretaker’s apartment). The rooms themselves colorfully represent some of the most iconic settings from Kubrick’s film, complete with moody lighting and deep shadows. Players move from one room to the next, completing the rooms’ designated actions and collecting willpower tokens over the course of their turn, hoping to collect enough willpower tokens to survive “the shining” phase of each game’s round, when players can be possessed by the hotel and attack their fellow players. Each room has its own unique effect, inviting player strategy as they decide, for example, whether venturing into Room 237 (where they could score multiple willpower tokens, if the luck of the token draw is on their side) is worth the risk. 

In terms of occupying and navigating these spaces, character movement is limited in multiple ways: characters can only move from one room to the next and if they want or need to move further, they must sacrifice a willpower token from the collective pool, weakening the group as a whole through this more wide-reaching exploration of the hotel. At the start of each round, the first player draws an event card, which often limits characters’ movement even further, by declaring a particular room “off limits” for that turn or blocking passage between the first and second floors. As a result, it often becomes impossible to move freely through the hotel or seek a space of relative safety or strategic advantage, evoking the high tension, claustrophobic experience of the Torrances trapped within the Overlook Hotel, with no means of escape. 

While the movement phase of each turn gives players the opportunity to move between some of the Overlook’s most recognizable rooms, the real impact of the game arguably comes in “the Shining” phase, where the deck is literally stacked against the characters. The willpower tokens players collect have varying values, from one to four; the exception is the whiskey tokens, where the more you have, the stronger your willpower is (1 drink token = 1 point, 2 = 4 points, 3 = 9 points), which seems pretty counterintuitive, since the forces in the Overlook use alcohol to compromise Jack’s willpower and turn him violently against his family. At the start of each turn, players blindly draw two “Shining” cards, representing the threats they will encounter in the halls of the Overlook. These remain face down until the Shining phase, though the back of these cards provide some clues as to the strength of these threats on a 1-5 scale with an indicated range of the to-be-revealed threat. In the Shining phase, players reconcile the value of their Shining cards with the willpower tokens they have been able to collect, and if the value of their willpower tokens is higher than the Shining cards’ total, their willpower holds. If not, their willpower fails, they are possessed by the hotel, and they turn against and attack their fellow players. 

While players may be able to strategize in their movement around the board and the willpower tokens they collect, these conflicts have an element of chance, with a dice roll determining the outcome of these attacks and any damage the other player sustains. This is one of the most engaging elements of the game, in my opinion. In King’s novel, Jack Torrance’s violence against his family is a slow descent and while he frequently recognizes the destructive nature of his actions and resists, he is ultimately unable to stand against the hotel’s malevolent power and possession. This process is arguably less complex and contested in Kubrick’s film, but in both, we get the clear sense that Jack is not entirely in control of or responsible for his actions. In Danny’s final confrontation with the being that was once his father in King’s novel, Danny says “You’re it, not my daddy. You’re the hotel” (652, emphasis original). The dice rolls that determine whether or not a character will attack and how much damage they will inflict when they do so mimics this experience of chance, of forces beyond one’s individual control. The Overlook Hotel influences the actions of those within it and similarly, the dice rolls decide the outcome of these attacks. 

Each player has three health tokens that can be lost through these attacks or an elevator ride gone wrong, and if a player loses all three of their health tokens, they die and the game ends for the whole group. However, players’ experiences of the Overlook Hotel are also framed as a matter of endurance: they just have to hang on long enough to make it through the winter, as symbolized by a month tracker in the upper-right corner of the board, in the hotel’s garage. Much like the different game elements that limit characters’ movement within the hotel by blocking rooms and passageways, this endurance adds to the players’ experience of limited options, claustrophobia, increasing tension, and desperation. 
Overall, players’ experience of the Overlook Hotel is centered around spatial navigation (and its limitation) and endurance, coupled with the combination of strategy and chance that decide the outcomes of players’ confrontations with the Overlook Hotel and with one another. While the navigation may seem deceptively simple on the board, Mixlore’s The Shining provides players with a new and engaged experience of at least a handful of the Overlook Hotel’s iconic locations, putting themselves in the Torrances’ place, and seeing if they’ll survive.

[Page numbers are from 2001 Pocket Books paperback edition of The Shining]