They’re turning Don’t Starve into a board game — here’s how

Glass Cannon Unplugged, a publisher known for board game adaptations of video games such as Frostpunk, Dying Light, and Apex Legends, has ambitious plans for its next crowdfunding project. This time the Polish studio is tackling Klei Entertainment’s breakout hit from the 2010s with Don’t Starve: The Board Game. But what does a roguelike survival game even look like on the tabletop? Polygon recently spoke with both teams of creatives about defining the board game’s relationship to the original and exploring the mechanics that will help bring this physical object to life.

Don’t Starve is a multi-platform, third-person video game first published in 2013. In it, players take on the role of a wild-haired scientist named Wilson who gets trapped in a dim, parallel dimension known as the Constant. They explore bizarre landscapes; craft weapons, tools, and structures; and make food in hopes of keeping Wilson alive and his sanity intact. Drawing from disparate influences such as Minecraft and Tim Burton films, the game has a steep learning curve spiced with permanent character death. But it developed a rabid following nonetheless, thanks in part to a rich narrative layer.

Don’t Starve: The Board Game is a highly modular design with many interlocking systems. The most basic is the map itself, which — like much of the game assets — will feature original art created by Klei. Players will explore that map hunting for resources, and eventually attempt to flee from it in the game’s final rounds. The current build uses rectangular playing cards to represent different biomes, which are then laid out onto a hexagonal grid to create the map. The result is a landmass with unique paths and chokepoints — the perfect environment for a tense exploration game.

Players control their characters from a sideboard, which tracks their health, hunger, and sanity. They also have an inventory, which includes items worn on the body, items held in the hands, and items stuffed inside a small backpack. As in the video game, much of the gameplay revolves around scavenging biomes and fighting monsters, all in the hope of collecting the resources needed to complete ever more complex tasks and recipes.

“The thing we wanted to focus on in Don’t Starve: The Board Game was actually the feeling of exploration,” explained lead designer Rafał Pieczyński. “Going into the unknown, exploring the areas, having fun with your friends as well, but sharing a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of discovery [between] the playthroughs. With every single game you learn something new, you go further into the story, or [discover] the things that might happen.”

Image: Glass Cannon Unplugged and Klei Entertainment

One of Pieczyński’s innovations on this project is in combining both a linear campaign and a series of one-off scenarios. It’s not a legacy-style game, and nothing in the box is permanently altered or destroyed. But there can be carry-over from game to game.

“You will be able to play [it] as a campaign game, or as a scenario-based game, or both at the same time,” Pieczyński said. “It’s quite [a] unique construct in that way. And the progression from the campaign will be saved [between] playthroughs [allowing players to] affect the world permanently.”

According to Glass Cannon CEO Jakub Wiśniewski, the tabletop adaptation began — as most board games do — as an unthemed prototype. The system was built by a young designer named Natanel Apfel, who’s now a visual effects artist at Riot Games. Apfel’s core design, as well as the revisions carried out by the current lead designer Pieczyński, who took over the project, eventually won out.

“Nate is an avid board game player,” Wiśniewski said. “He showed us a prototype, and we were like, ‘Holy smoke, this is really good survival! Maybe we should think about something like this!’” Before long, the team reached out to 11 bit studios, who they’d worked with previously on This War of Mine: The Board Game. That studio, headquartered in Poland just like Glass Cannon is, played the good neighbor and was able to broker an introduction to Klei’s team in Canada.

“When we spoke,” Wiśniewski said, “[Klei] had already rejected a lot of prototypes, both internally and externally.”

“There was clearly a lot of love and care put into how the game both looked and played even in the early prototypes,” said Corey Rollins, head of marketing at Klei. “They also explained to us their process for designing a tabletop game and it was very similar to how Klei has been using Early Access as a core part of our DNA. [...] It seemed like a more natural fit to work with Glass Cannon.”

In a campaign, players can carry over the resources, recipes, and even some of the things that they’ve constructed from game to game. Just as in the video game, crafting options will unlock and expand over time to provide new short-term goals as well as enabling the larger narrative to unfold. But players must always pay close attention to those three core stats of health, hunger, and sanity (they may not start each game quite as healthy or sane as they might like to be).

Image: Glass Cannon Unplugged and Klei Entertainment

Like any good survival game, hunger may be the most important stat of all. With a full stomach, players will receive more Focus Tokens, which allow you to re-roll dice. Focus Tokens can turn the tide in the game’s dice-based combat.

All of this means that, like many other Glass Cannon projects, Don’t Starve: The Board Game is a fairly literal interpretation of the moment-to-moment action found in the video game. That design ethos has been both a boon and a burden for this team in the past. For instance, in Polygon’s review of This War of Mine: The Board Game, a title co-designed by Glass Canon’s CEO Wiśniewski, we noted that it was a pretty tough sell for those who hadn’t already played the original — or for those who already owned the original and could play that instead. The same can be said of Frostpunk: The Board Game, although that title seems to have fared much better with consumers.

Wiśniewski says that this time around his team is designing Don’t Starve: The Board Game with board gamers, not video game players, more firmly in mind.

“Don’t Starve is such an incredible work of art, because the game overlaps on so many levels,” Wiśniewski said. “Not only the art, the music, but also the design, the story, how it’s hidden, how they go about each peculiar detail. Getting rid of some aspects would [...] not do it enough justice. So we’d rather have extra work on our side thinking how to serve it on a more digestible platter than cut things and lose them as we go.”

“The fun thing for me is that a lot of people that have seen the game, they feel like it’s a literal adaptation of the game, but it’s amazing that with all the streamlined rules that the game itself isn’t really that hard to play,” Pieczyński said.

Don’t Starve: The Board Game will come to Kickstarter for its initial round of funding this fall, with the current goal to ship the game by the fourth quarter of 2025. The team also tells Polygon that at least seven languages will be available at launch, including English, German, French, Polish, Spanish, Italian, and Czech. Pricing has not yet been determined.