Book writing continues and I recently finished the board games chapter, featuring games based on Andy Muschietti’s IT films (2017, 2019) and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of The Shining.

Here’s are a couple of previews of the section on The Shining and Prospero Hall’s The Shining 2020 board game:

In King’s IT, the children of the Losers Club must effectively navigate and claim agency within the dark town of Derry if they are going to survive, a struggle that takes them down city streets, into the Barrens, to the library and the House on Neibolt Street, and deep into the sewers. They must range far and wide, exploring the town and uncovering its terrifying secrets in order to find and fight Pennywise. In The Shining, the opposite is true: Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy, and his son Danny are spending the winter at the Overlook Hotel and once the snow begins to fall, the hotel becomes their whole world, an inescapable prison. Some locations—like Dick Hallorann’s welcoming kitchen—are kinder and safer than others, but there is no escape, no real reassurance of safety or survival. Both The Shining and the Coded Chronicles game The Shining: Escape from the Overlook Hotel (2020) foreground this isolated and claustrophobic setting, challenging players to survive by moving within limited spaces as they attempt to understand and endure the hotel’s dark power and influence. Both games draw specifically from the imagery and narrative of Kubrick’s film adaptation, which also provides opportunities to consider the role of The Shining in the popular culture imagination, the intersections and tensions between King’s novel and Kubrick’s film, and the King’s horrors beyond the familiar Maine landscape. […]

Prospero Hall’s The Shining acts as a kind of sequel, with players taking on the role of caretakers who have come to the Overlook Hotel after the Torrances’ fatal winter. Following in the footsteps of the snowed-in caretakers who have come before them, players have limited options for movement, confined to the rooms and property of the Overlook Hotel, but there is flexibility in gameplay strategy, as players choose whether they want to take a cooperative or competitive approach. As Michael Barnes explains these two options in The Shining, the first “is a straight co-op game […] The goal is to survive 4 rounds while being psychically buffeted by the hotel’s malevolent, unseen forces,” while in the “‘hidden traitor’ mode […] one player is working at cross purposes against the players on behalf of said malevolent, unseen forces.” In the cooperative mode, gameplay follows many of the same strategies employed by players in Evil Below and the pre-Haunt interactions of Betrayal at the Neibolt House, with players working together toward a common goal of survival and incentivized to make choices that benefit to the group as a whole, since one player’s failure means the whole team loses.

Depending on the gameplay mode players choose, the stakes and strategies of navigating the Overlook Hotel and interacting with their fellow players differ: in the cooperative mode, the goal is simply to survive four turns, with each turn representing one of the isolated winter months in which the caretakers are stranded at the hotel. The focus is on endurance: building enough willpower to withstand the predations of the hotel and keeping an eye on the finish line. There is no way to avoid taking damage and suffering from the ill effects of the Overlook Hotel, but if players can hang on to a bare minimum of Willpower for just long enough to make it through the winter, they can prevail and escape. In contrast, if there is a traitor in their midst, it is not enough for players to simply survive through four turns, because even if they make it through the long, cold winter, they can be sabotaged and defeated by the traitor. Unlike in Betrayal at the Neibolt House where the identity of the traitor (if there is one) is known to all players with the introduction of the Haunt phase, in The Shining, the traitor is a secret, leaving players guessing and trying to interpret their fellow players’ actions to determine whether they are friend or foe. The stakes of guessing wrong have a huge impact on the game itself, with the rules explaining that “if the Caretakers fail to identify the Corrupted before the end of the fourth month, then the Corrupted will sabotage the snowcat, preventing escape, and forcing the Caretakers to survive a fifth month before the snow thaws and help arrives” (1). Not correctly identifying the traitor is not a case of sudden death or unavoidable defeat, but it does extend the time and terror that players have to endure in the Overlook Hotel, if they have any hope of being successful.