Many a developer has tried to translate a shooter video game into a board game. Among the best Ive played was Fantasy Flight Games Tannhauser, now out of print, which used a subtly coded game board to communicate things like range and line of sight. Its a challenge that the team at Steamforged Games recently tackled in the development of Helldivers 2: The Board Game. Their solution? Make a different kind of game entirely.
When Helldivers 2 burst onto the scene in February 2024, its appeal came in large part from the four-player cooperative gameplay. Sure, the moment-to-moment gunplay was excellent, but the big laughs always arrived thanks to the communication — or lack thereof — between the players. For board game designers Derek Funkhouser (The Walking Dead: Something to Fear) and Nick Yu (Dungeons & Dragons: Onslaught, Adventure Tactics), it was imperative to keep that style of interaction in the final board game. To do that, they actually loaded up the original game and took it for a spin.
The original Helldivers, published in 2015, is a third-person overhead action game — kind of like Diablo with guns. And that, it turns out, makes a great template for a board game. The final result is a tile-based exploration game, with players moving around freely from point to point and pulling new encounters from a deck of cards.
“We wanted to see what can we make in the tabletop space that feels like Helldivers 2, but isnt Helldivers 2,” Yu said in an interview with Polygon earlier this month. “We can do all the great things that feel good in Helldivers 2. We still kept it on the level of the players, [meaning] each individual player is still an individual Helldiver. And we kept in a lot of [other elements of that game, including] the cool moment-to-moment things about fighting, combat extraction, friendly fire, and most importantly stratagems.”
Otherwise, its a bit of a different take, both visually and mechanically. But while players arent aiming down iron sights, they are still communicating, still exploring, and still getting into all manner of trouble in various corners of the map. Theyre still playing Helldivers 2, just from a different perspective.
Many elements of Helldivers 2 also served as a point of reference by inspiring gameplay elements in the board game. Among the most important? The games heads-up display.
In Helldivers 2: The Board Game, players drop onto the map, all geared up and ready to roll. Theyll know lots of things from the start, including the major objective and the alien force theyll be fighting against. But, just as in the video game, all theyve got to go on in terms of guidance is the equivalent of glowing pips on the HUD — a series of breadcrumbs to follow into battle.
“One of the cool things that came out of this was the fact that it really puts players in this difficult situation,” said Funkhouser. “OK, if we all spread out and explore by ourselves, were going to find the objective faster and do better this mission. But it also means were going to be left alone to fight. So do we go in pairs? Do I go by myself?”
And, just as in the video game, splitting the party often leads to challenging and hilarious outcomes.
“We know my best friend over here is never going to be a team player,” Funkhouser continued. “Hes going to run off and do his own thing, so hes going to die. Then were going to have to call him back in, were going to complain, be like, What are you doing? Youre wasting our reinforcements! So theres just a lot of this table talk thats happening and players are really going to be in this chaotic cooperative situation.”
The Gamefound campaign for Helldivers 2: The Board Game runs for the next six days. You can grab the base game, due by 2026, for roughly $80.
