Essays on TTRPGs

Essay 2: Chess is a Boxed RPG

"Unboxed" RPGs and repurposing board game components.

Chess is a Boxed RPG.

This essay is the second in a series of essays about repurposing board games for RPGs. I wrote it as part of the design process for Violent Delights: A chess-based RPG about Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.

Romeo kisses Juliet in a chequer-floored ballroom.

The Rise of the Boxed RPG

Boxed RPGs have been around for a while. Consider the legendary 1988 Bullwinkle and Rocky Role-Playing Party Game, which came with cards, character stand-ups, spinners, and hand puppets. And yet the last few years have seen the rise of boxed and custom card-based RPGs in games from For the Queen (2019) to Mothership (2024), a trend that has been singled out frequently in tabletop RPG media over the last year or so.

In November of 2025, Quinns Quest covered boxed games like Desperation, Tacklebox, City of Winter, and Lovecraftesque. Quinns joined Sam Dunnewold for Mausritter month to discuss the sword-and-whiskers boxed set on Dice Exploder. And Aaron King and Maxwell Lander covered an additional eight boxed RPGs — beyond those already listed — in the sixth season of RTFM (April 2025).

Many of these boxed sets are visually appealing — “shiny,” big, and beautified. The play materials that come with them are exciting and toylike. They sell themselves. But there is more to boxed RPGs than their flashy exterior.

Boxed sets introduce new opportunities for play surfaces and tactile play beyond books, character sheets, and dice or playing cards. Mausritter has a notably unique inventory system that uses physical item cards. Some boxed sets leverage custom dice with unique pips (e.g. The One Ring) or separate colors to distinguish a dice’s purpose. And many boxed RPGs use maps, miniatures, and/or props to facilitate fictional consensus between players, whether they depict fictional locations as in City of Winter or the range of a ship’s scanners in Mothership.

Game text can also be placed on custom cards as a helpful tool for managing bandwidth, improving usability, and saving time during play. And play mats and game boards help organize play materials while also making it easier to pick up cards or tokens.

It’s hard to generalize about boxed RPGs, which can be so different from one another. Card-based games are a different beast from “assorted” boxes. But I think it's broadly fair to say that boxed RPGs seek to (1) leverage different modes and media of expression for innovative play, (2) facilitate learning the game and playing, and/or (3) appeal to one’s love of toys, familiarity with board games, or value placed on big boxes.

The Downsides

Of course, boxed RPGs have their challenges too — more for designers and consumers than for players, and mostly for the assorted boxes. One challenge is the expense of production and assembly. It may be more affordable to source or manufacture materials from multiple companies or a company in another country, in which case you also need to navigate shipping fees and tariffs. Designers must also do their research. Manufacturers may cut their expenses with exploitative labor practices or environmentally harmful production.

As for distribution, if a fulfillment partner assembles your box for you, you are likely to have additional expenses based on how many assorted items they are packing. You may also find that shipping fees make your game impractical or exorbitantly priced for some regions. And boxes, however they may be categorized, are likely to be taxed at a greater rate than books, making your game cost-prohibitive in certain countries.

In brief, creating a boxed RPG can require resources (time, money, connections) that are not available for many designers, and especially in 2026, these challenges make it difficult to earn a profit on these games, if that’s your goal.

Unboxed RPGs

I am tempted by boxed RPGs as a designer. And I also wonder about other ways to achieve the benefits and approachability that we attribute to boxed sets without the challenges of manufacturing and distribution. For example, I so appreciate when a card-based game like Bully Pulpit’s Desperation provides a print-and-play version of its cards.

And among tabletop RPGs is already a sort of “antiboxed” or an “unboxed” RPG: the opposite of a boxed set, a game that aims for similar design benefits without the box. These are RPGs that adapt common board games, whose pieces may be conveniently incorporated into play and which is its own form of approachability. These games rely on players already owning a board game or being able to purchase a board game separately. They borrow the board and pieces to create tactility and visuality, fictional consensus, and unique oracles.

Jenga and Dread.

The best known of the games that I’ll discuss is Dread (2006), which won an ENnie for Innovation. Dread is a horror RPG that uses “the fairly ubiquitous Jenga,” which takes 54 wooden blocks and stacks them by three in alternating directions.

In Jenga, players take turns pulling blocks of wood and then placing those blocks on top of the tower. With each pull, the tower becomes more unstable, and the more unstable the tower, the more fearful or stressed the player is when they pull from it. Eventually, a player causes the tower to collapse, and the game ends. The last player to successfully complete a turn before the tower’s collapse is the winner.

Dread takes the heart of these rules and translates it into a resolution mechanic for a horror RPG: Any time a character attempts something that they may not be able to do or that the current situation may aggravate, their player must pull a block from the tower. If the tower collapses, the character is removed from the narrative.

Jenga is a game with tactility and visuality, and Epidiah and Nat brought those elements into Dread to reproduce the fear and stress that accompanies a horror narrative. When you pull a block or place it on the tower, you can feel the tower shift and shudder. You can see the precarity of your situation, as the tower leans and wavers.

This borrowed tactility and visuality is especially effective when tenuous narrative moments align with tenuous pulls from the tower, and as the game goes on, the likelihood of these co-occurrences increases. With each character removed from the game, the tower begins in a state that is less stable than the last.

The game also allows you to abandon a pull, endorsing moments of hesitation as you feel the tower shift or see it lean. In Dread, an abandoned pull is a failed attempt, but it may mean that your character is likely to survive a little bit longer. Or your hesitation may be what spells your character’s death.

And of all the clever ways that the blocks work in this game, my favorite is how the fiction can mirror your interaction with the tower. For example, you pull a block, and it seems like the tower is fine, but then it slowly tips to one side. You, as the player, may translate these feelings and observations into your interpretation of the narrative action, or the Host may explicitly mirror the tower’s action in their description of the dramatic action: You leap across a chasm, and for a moment you think you’re going to make it, but then you fall just short of the ledge.

Chess, The Dance and the Dawn, and Fake Chess.

Chess is one of the most popular games in the world. It’s an 8x8 grid-based game with two sets of six unique types of game pieces. It is an abstract game: the black and white squares do not tell you anything about the setting. Although each type of piece is visually distinct and has its own unique movement patterns, the pieces do not tell you much about their character — you don’t pause to say, “It’s not in the bishop’s character to capture the queen right now.” Rather, the goal of chess is to move your pieces in such a way that traps your enemy’s king, and the abstract nature of the game allows you to focus on abstract strategy.

The application of chess may be obvious for a hobby and art form that frequently makes use of grids, maps, and miniatures. For example, Knighthouse Co.’s Starcross Arena (2022), a sci-fi RPG about an interplanetary fighting tournament, adapts chess’s board and its unique pieces for skirmish-style play. The abstract board represents various battle landscapes, and the unique pieces become fighter types and a captain character of your choosing. Rather than trapping the other player’s captain, your faction wins by having the last character alive.

For a similar end with an entirely different premise, The Dance and the Dawn (2009) turns the abstract chessboard into a checker-floored ballroom for a game in which three ladies dance with four suitors. Rather than seeking to trap the other player’s king, each player plays as one of the ladies and their goal is to determine who among their suitors is their true love. Each type of chess piece denotes a different character and interprets the original piece’s characteristics, and each player moves their piece and their current dance partner around the board using the knight’s pattern, swirling expressively to a waltz. When one pair enters a square adjacent to another pair, they may comment on the other dancers, seeking approval from the Ice Queen who presides over the board. Or, they may switch dance partners, allowing them to speak with a lord to determine whether they are their true love. It’s a beautiful, tactical Viennese waltz.

In both of these games, the unique pieces represent characters. Combined with the chess board, they facilitate fictional consensus and allow for strategic planning.

Fake Chess (2020) is another tabletop RPG that adapts chess’s grid and its miniatures, although in a unique way. In this case, you have a chess board with all of the chess pieces, but their positioning does not matter, nor do the typical rules for chess. All that matters are the pieces’ presence on the board. Without chess rules, you have a separate gridded worksheet that determines your moves. You start in a designated square of the worksheet and progress through adjacent squares toward a designated “checkmate” square. Each box tells you which piece you can move and where you can move it to, according to whether the box is shaded or not. If you cannot move into any adjacent squares, you resign the game.

Seemingly, the goal of Fake Chess is to achieve checkmate, as it is in chess; however, you do so either by reaching the checkmate box or by capturing all of your opponent’s pieces. The real goal of Fake Chess is to simply pretend that you are playing chess. In fact, you get special moves, like skipping over a square in your worksheet, based on how you roleplay, e.g. cursing the state of the board, falling in love with your opponent, or naming your opponent’s strategy, (“‘Ah, the binkyburg defense. Classic.’ ‘The Bigot’s gambit. Very risky.’ Etc.).

In Fake Chess, the board still creates consensus but not in its abstract representation of a battlefield or court intrigue. Instead, it creates consensus as a diegetic object, a prop within the fiction.

Scrabble, The Far Roofs, and Asher’s Ridge.

Finally, Scrabble is a game whose English-language set contains 100 tiles, including two blank tiles. The quantity of tiles for each letter as well as the letter’s point value is based on its frequency in English. Scrabble has 12 tiles for E, which is worth only one point, and it has one tile for Q and Z, which are each worth 10 points — the highest value. Players draw the tiles and add them to a rack. From this rack they arrange the tiles into words, placing them on a 15x15 grid, some of which have multipliers. For each word placed, you receive points according to the sum of the letters’ point values after applying multipliers. Your goal is to accumulate the most points.

Jenna Moran’s The Far Roofs (2024) and Montford Tales’ Asher’s Ridge (2026) are two tabletop RPGs that use Scrabble tiles – or may allow you to assemble tilesets from other games like Bananagrams. In The Far Roofs, which is an RPG of heroic talking rats and monster-god Mysteries on moody fantasy roofscapes, letter tiles are called components, and these components are used to solve “muddles”: grand dilemmas that require you “to grow to find a solution to, over time.” You earn components when you have a satisfying interaction with the fictional world, and you use these components to build a solution — a 1-2 word answer that is emblematic of the solutions that the characters come to.

For instance, maybe there’s a relationship they’re feeling out the boundaries of. What do they think of this? Over time they pick up letters like OET DUR SBZ EDT WTK NNE MPC. They’d been thinking about trying to claim it as a BEST friendship for a while, but it didn’t fit. Once they finally get a C, though, they can claim a word that’s been slowly taking over as the one they want: CURSED.

In The Far Roofs, tiles are randomizers. Each tile is flipped over and mixed around. The letters have a statistical distribution in this pile that affects how you assemble words and ultimately which words you can assemble. The tiles also function as an “oracle,” a tool that uses randomization to guide the narrative or answer a question.

But rather than giving an image, word, or phrase that the players interpret upfront, the tiles serve as building blocks or "components" with which the players can assemble their solution. In The Far Roofs, the beauty of this is that the process of assembling a word mirrors that of assembling a solution, and this process may inform your interpretation of its resolution.

Similarly, in Asher’s Ridge, which is a paranormal drama television-inspired RPG, you draw tiles to create a letter pool. From your pool, you form “threads,” which represent a plot point in your “episode”:

For example, you might add the thread gun, and find one during this scene. The object may be a vague ‘gun’, or something more specific. … How the gun fits into the episode’s plot is up to you.

Alternatively, a character may forget their gun, be denied a gun, hear a gun, or overhear conversation about a hunter setting out with their gun and their dog. Whatever you decide, you say the thread ‘gun’ at some point during the scene and involve the thread in the overarching plot of your episode.

The tiles in Asher’s Ridge have a similar function to The Far Roofs, as both a randomizer and an oracle. But Asher’s Ridge also borrows Scrabble’s visuality: You place these tiles in a common area — the thread zone — when you spell out a word, and if this thread connects to another thread, then these plot points are connected as well. The thread zone becomes a visual representation of plot points and storylines.

Conclusion

A lot of innovation is occurring with boxed RPGs, but the current challenges facing boxed RPGs has me considering a path forward for these types of games through the simplicity and scrappiness that has historically enabled broad access to tabletop RPGs. When all you need is the game text — or the game text and some dice, or the game text, a character sheet, and some cards — that simplicity is its own advantage for affordability, distribution, and portability.

Unboxed RPGs keep the scrappy, accessible spirit of tabletop RPGs alive while pushing into different modes and media of expression for innovative play. Adaptation of existing board games may not be as commercially appealing as the items in a boxed set, yet the fact that so many people own these games and know their rules makes the RPG more approachable. In fact, unboxed RPGs may change how some think about the board games they adapt, drawing attention to the fact that the "conversational" and roleplay elements that we love about tabletop RPGs have been in board games all along.

Finally, I appreciate that many unboxed RPGs value availability and access. Although they rely on pieces from “fairly ubiquitous” games, games like The Far Roofs and Dread also suggest alternatives to these pieces. In fact, Dread has a section on “Alternative Methods” in its game text. One of those alternatives is “pick-up sticks.” The other alternative, which feels like an equivalent of Desperation’s print-and-play, is to play with stacking dice piles, and Dread gives detailed suggestions on how to use this alternative. And of course, you can always make your own Jenga blocks as well and experiment with their dimensions, as Epidiah and Nat suggest in their introduction.

For me, this is part of what makes Dread a “good” unboxed RPG.

These games capture the DIY-spirit of tabletop RPGs and trust the players to create fun with whatever they have at hand.

Other Essays and Interviews in This Series