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13 Classic Board Games that Became a Movie or TV Series

Odin Halvorson
19 min readJan 17, 2023

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Board games have been a staple of human civilization for at least the last 7,000 years, with dice discovered in burial grounds in what is modern-day Turkey. The ancient Egyptian royalty, too, loved board games, with the Egyptian game Senet being the oldest known complete board game (though its rules have been lost to the ages)…

Since the early 1900s, however, games have blossomed worldwide, expanding into what is now a thematic industry driven by concepts like art and story as much as by clever rules.

With so many great games to draw from, the progression from game concept to fully-fledged stories seems natural.

There aren’t as many films or shows based on board games as there are board games based on movies, but there are a few. For some others, the documentaries exploring their histories and modern-day players are about as dramatic as any Hollywood hit.

Here are the board games that became either movies or TV shows!

Board game: Clue

Board game: Clue

In 1944, a man named Anthony E. Pratt filed the first patent for the game that would become Clue. A musician and composer by trade, Pratt spent time during WWII working in a plant that manufactured parts for tanks.

While his factory work was less than thrilling, it did give him time to think about his experiences playing concerts at country hotels in his pre-war life, hotels where the after-dinner game of choice was often the soling of a mystery.

Pratt, a massive fan of the detective fiction of the era, including Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, combined his own experiences with a larger thematic concept and, together with his wife Elva, designed a board game based…

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Odin Halvorson
Odin Halvorson

Written by Odin Halvorson

A futurist/socialist/fantasist writer, editor, and scholar. MFA/MLIS. Free access to my articles at OdinHalvorson.substack.com | More over at OdinHalvorson.com.

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