Fictional Board Game

Sounds "dodjy"...

It's game night, and the characters want to have some fun. Why not do it with a classic board game?

But they usually run into one of several problems:

1. Lawyers are hungry and major brands have to pay too much money for the pleasure of advertising one of their games.
2. The writers thought of the idea too late in the game to make the necessary arrangements, in TV especially.
3. The production company saw the opportunity to eventually create and market the game themselves.
4. The setting makes any modern board game unlikely or impossible (which is the case for most of the examples).
5. Most importantly, the fictional game says something about the characters, makes a plot plot, or even sets up a joke in a way no existing game could.

For any of the reasons listed above, the work ends up making do with a fake one.

More often than not, and similarly to a Fictional Video Game (its Sister Trope), these games will draw heavy inspiration from popular real life board games, if not be just reskinned and/or recolored copies of them. Another version is making the game so needlessly complex with countless rules that it just isn't fun to play (although one character, usually the one who brought or suggested the game in the first place, will insist that it is fun or not as complex as it seems).

If one becomes popular enough with its out-of-universe audience, it may undergo Defictionalization, either by fans or officially released licensed versions.

Can also be a Bland-Name Product (fictional brand name similar to that of a real life product/company). Can overlap with Calvinball if the rules of the board game are too bizarre to understand.

Compare Fictional Sport. Super-Trope for Cloneopoly, which are fictional versions of Monopoly.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Hunter × Hunter has Gungi, a two-player strategy board game native to the country of East Gorteau. While the manga doesn't go into too much detail about its mechanics, the game is played in a 9x9 board and the goal is to get the opponent's King into checkmate. This game becomes an important plot point as the Chimera Ant King begins to get attached to East Gorteau's Gungi champion, whom he cannot seem to beat.
• Several chapters of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War feature Happy Life, a card-based game created by the Tabletop Games club that appears to have been inspired by Game of Life.

Fanfiction

• In the Fusion Fic The Sponge House, which is plots from SpongeBob SquarePants but characters from The Loud House, "Dirty Mouth" (a parody of the Spongebob episode "Sailor Mouth") has the twins play Laundry Chutes and Ladders, which is just like Eels and Escalators from the SpongeBob episode but with different objects.

Films — Animation

• In Arthur Christmas, Arthur tries to soothe some strained family relations by sitting them all down to a friendly game of Christmas: The Board Game after their Christmas dinner. And as is tradition with any family playing board games at Christmas, it's beset by bickering over who gets which player token, accusations of cheating, and ends with the board overturned and everyone angry at everyone else.

Films — Live-Action

• Jumanji is about a cursed board game that creates a dangerous jungle as it's played. It doesn't go away until somebody wins the game.
  • Its sequel, Zathura, is very similar, except the board game sends the players to space instead.
• Play Misty for Me has Dave Garver and his friendly bartender set up an impromptu game on a bar napkin with four pieces each. It's played similarly to chess, with analysis and strategy. Dave wins the game, and attracts the attention of a pretty patron, Evelyn. He later admits the game was a ruse to break the ice.
• In RoboCop (1987), a TV advertisement for a game called Nukem is shown.
  "You crossed my line of death!"
• The Star Wars Expanded Universe has Sabacc, a card game frequently played by characters like Han Solo and Lando Calrissian resembling a fusion of poker and blackjack played with a tarot deck.
  • Solo features a version of Sabaac (dubbed "Corellian Spike") played with hexagonal cards that have red, green, or blue abstract patterns. In Disney's defictionalized version, the green cards are worth positive points while red are negative and you try to get as close to +/- 23 without going over.
  • Pazaak is another card game even closer to blackjack.
  • Dejarik is a holographic board game vaguely similar to chess.

Literature

• In the Arcia Chronicles, characters often play Ehrmet, a chess-like game where players blindly draw their pieces from a bag before the game starts. There are mentions of certain particularly lucky players drawing impossible combinations of pieces, implying that the game has some magical properties (or that they just cheat).
• A Song of Ice and Fire has cyvasse, which is conceptually similar to chess. It is played by two players and features ten different types of pieces, each with different powers and attributes. The game originated in Volantis and is played throughout Essos. After sailors from Volantis introduced cyvasse to the Dornish, it became a craze among the court at Sunspear and is steady becoming popular in Westeros.
• In Battlefield Earth, several high-ranking aliens are shown at one point playing a game called "Klepp"; by the description, it sounds like a hex-based strategy game. The aliens playing this game use it as a way to resolve how to divvy up loot from Earth between each other.
• Discworld:
  • Thud! features a fictional board game^note Well, to be pedantic, a game that had existed in the real world for about three years at that point. also called "Thud", which is similar to the ancient Norse games of Hnefatafl and Tablut, and in-universe is a board game representation of the "Battle of Koom Valley", a historical battle between trolls and dwarfs that is also at the centre of the novel's plot. The game features Fragile Speedster Dwarves (can move as far as they like in any direction, but have to outnumber to capture) against Mighty Glacier Trolls (can only move one space but will win any 1v1 encounter). It's only properly played if a player plays both teams in one sitting.
  • The Discworld Companion details a chess variant called "Stealth Chess", which adds an extra file to both sides of the board, and extra pieces ("Assassins") which are moved along these files and can then pop out somewhere else on the board to make a capture. The book points out that Havelock Vetinari, provost of the Guild of Assassins and patrician of Ankh-Morpork, is a grandmaster at Stealth Chess — very fitting, given his mastery of stealthy and surprising tactical moves in both his political and... professional careers.
  • In Reaper Man, Death says that he once had to play "Exclusive Possession" rather than chess. He was the boot.
  • In Hogfather Ridcully, alone out of the wizards, loves the board games that people drag out at Hogswatch and never play at any other time, mentioning "Chase My Neighbour Up the Passage" and "Hooray, Jolly Tinker".
• In Mary Gentle's Golden Witchbreed, the people of Orthe play a board game called ochmir, which involves covering a hexagonal board with flippable triangular pieces. The rules of the game are included in the book.
• In the Gor series of novels, the inhabitants of the planet Gor play a chess-like game called Kaissa. The Ubar and Ubara move like queens, the Tarnsman moves like a knight, the Initiate moves like a bishop and Spearmen act like pawns.
• The titular board game in Interstellar Pig is an Absurdly High-Stakes Game in which the players take the roles of various alien species and battle for control of a MacGuffin called the "Piggy". Whoever holds the Piggy at the end of the game is the winner; the homeworlds of all the other players are destroyed. The Piggy is real and there are real aliens on Earth in search of it, but it's heavily implied that the Piggy is only a harmless recording device that invented the game itself so that it would be passed from world to world and learn all sorts of information in the process.
• Kane Series: In Dark Crusade, Kane plays a complicated board game with his second-in-command. It involves a hexagonal board, dice and pieces that are numbered 1-6. The roll of the die decides from which side of the hexagon a piece can be moved. There are as many pieces of each rank as their value and their numbers are hidden. When a player moves a piece next to the other player's piece, they can challenge the other player, who can accept the challenge or decline it and move back. If the challenge is accepted, the higher piece wins. As the numbers are hidden, the players have to have a very good memory to remember the value of their pieces, as well as that of their opponents.
• The Kingkiller Chronicle: Kvothe plays Tak, a board game that's "simple in its rules, but complex in its strategy", with his enigmatic mentor Bredon in the Vintish court. The rules aren't described in the book, but the game later got an official Defictionalization.
  Bredon: A well-played game of Tak reveals the moving of a mind.
• Kwasa the Cliff Dweller, by Katherine Atherton Grimes, has a game involving three canes painted red and white on each side. In the first chapter, they're used for some Roll-and-Move game—the rules are slightly unclear, where three whites allow moving two spaces, three reds move one, and a mixed doesn't seem to permit movement.
• Malediction Trilogy: Trolls play the game of Guerre, which looks quite like chess but it's played on four boards and the pieces are different; there are kings and queens but also princes and princesses, warriors, tricksters and assassins. In Hidden Huntress, the game is used by two characters to exchange important information even though they are being spied upon.
• The Seventh Tower: Beastmaker. Players are dealt cards depicting various fantastical beasts, and assign them to various stats to create their own beast. Each card also has two other cards it can be changed to by applying the appropriate color of light. When both players have assigned their final cards, the game board creates two beasts out of light, and they fight.
• Triton features a game called "Vlet," which is an Adventure board game popular amongst spacers that combines aspects of Dungeons & Dragons, Risk, Chess, Tarot, and Contract Bridge. It features an animated overworld board and a holography tank for Wizard Duels. Scoring is done by means of using a theoretical physics equation. Random generation is based on four six-sided dice (three are black with white dots and one is clear with diamond dots) and one seven-sided die, plus a deck of cards.
• Walking On Glass by Iain Banks mentions one-dimensional chess (the only rule that is defined is that bishops move on their own colour, ignoring pieces on the other colour), open-plan go (played on an infinite board) and spotless dominoes (played without any markings on the domino pieces). No other details are given.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • Snakes and Foxes is a board- and dice-based game that most children love until they realize it's Unwinnable by Design. The present age has all but forgotten that the game's true purpose is to warn people about the Aelfinn and Eelfinn and to hint at how to beat them by trickery.
  • Stones is played similarly to real-life Go, is popular across the continent, and is considered a gentleman's game. Experts in the game are often also skilled military commanders, like Mat; or politickers, like Thom.
  • Moridin is a master of Sha'rah, a long-lost, highly complex tafl-style game that's based on control of a neutral Fisher King piece. The game, and that piece in particular, have a lot of symbolic associations with Rand, Moridin's nemesis.
• In the Star Wars Expanded Universe Lando Calrissian prequels there was Sabacc, which was like Blackjack with some suits scoring negative, winning on a value of 23, -23 or 0 and where the electronic cards would change values occasionally.

Live-Action TV

• All in the Family: In the Season 4 episode "The Games Bunkers Play", Mike is enthused about a new game called Group Therapy, which asks its players tough questions and requires honest answers. Mike, however, gets more than he bargained for when all the tough questions get posed to him, while the others seem to get softball questions.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • The boys often play a card game named Mystic Warlords of Ka'a. One episode features a Wild West expansion pack.
  • Sheldon tries to develop a three-player version of chess.
  • Sheldon also creates a science-themed board game, Research Lab.
    Sheldon: The physics is theoretical, but the fun is real.
    Leonard: We must not be playing it right.
• The Brittas Empire: "The Chop" opens with the staff playing a customized version of Game of Life created by Brittas. From what we see of it, it involves designating characters as a "Wise Virgin" or "Foolish Virgin" as well as each character having to suffer a catastrophe each year. The players are also given three starting cards that show the player's aptitudes, genetic heritage, and socio-economical background.
• The final episode of Community ends with a commercial for a board game based on the show which remarks on the show's Better than a Bare Bulb tendencies. The commercial shows a family of three playing the game and the son producing a special item, the script for the very commercial they're shooting. The father then reprimands the "stupid child" (his words) for proving they don't exist.
• Firefly: In "Shindig", the crew plays a card game that uses round cards with pictures of fruit on them. "Tall card... plum. Plums are tall." In fact, the actors demanded that the writer make up a full set of actual rules for the game so that they'd know what they were doing, but since we never find out what the rules are, it comes off as Calvinball.
• Good Luck Charlie: In "Teddy and the Bambino", PJ, Gabe and Charlie play a board game called Puppy Town. As they play the game, PJ and Gabe keep getting arrested by Sheriff Kitty, and question the logic of why a dog would take orders from a cat.
• In Home Improvement, Al makes a prototype for a Tool Time board game, complete with a tiny ambulance that takes the player to the hospital. Unfortunately, it shorts out and catches fire because the company that Al used to mass produce the game had put in the wrong kind of wires.
• In How I Met Your Mother, Lily's dad hopes to make his fortune developing the next iconic board game. His attempts include one called Diseases and another about stepping on things in the dark. He finally finds success with Lights Out.
• Les Inconnus: "Jorétapo"^note Name is phonetic for "J'aurai ta peau" (lit. "I'll have your skin") which essentially means "I'll get you" presents a fictional board game simulating the corruption of 1980s French politics.
• The "Complecatrix" sketch in Incredible Crew exaggerates an example with numerous rules in song form.
• In an episode of Malcolm in the Middle when Malcolm is away, the family plays a Risk-style board game that Malcolm usually wins. The game degenerates into a Cold-War-style standoff between Lois and Reese, with Dewey knocked out of the game and Hal reduced to a single tank. Eventually, the family decides to burn the game.
• Newhart:
  • George Utley invents a board game called Handyman that becomes a local smash hit. You gain 3 points every time you land on a scoring space, and there is no other way to gain or lose points. You win when you score exactly one million points. Three does not divide evenly into one million.
  • The board game Big Bursting Brains is apparently a comically exaggerated version of Trivial Pursuit. No one in the cast is able to successfully answer a single question — except Stephanie, who uses her background in fashion to make a correct educated guess about the color of scarf some historical figure wore to a funeral.
• In Parks and Recreation, Ben designs the convoluted and elaborate "Cones of Dunshire" tabletop game while unemployed. It features several of the classic RPG "classes", involves rolling dice (including rolling a die to determine how many dice you get to roll), and vaguely seems to be about capturing cities. Everyone he shows the game to in his personal life is turned off by its complexity, but he does leave it with an accounting firm who is constantly trying to hire him and they love it for that same reason. Some time later, it has made it's way to the Gryzzl tech corporation where Ben wins a game in order to secure free high-speed internet for Pawnee. As it turns out, the accounting firm patented the game in Ben's name and it has actually been fairly successful. In the final season following the Time Skip, he has even created a sequel —"Cones of Dunshire, The Adventure Continues: The Winds of Tremorrah" — which a gaming magazine has called "punishingly intricate", something that Ben is actually proud of. It has been defictionalized and can be played in real life.
• Red Dwarf: "Samsara" starts with Rimmer and Lister playing a game called Mine-opoly (a JMC-branded version of Monopoly). Instead of passing 'go', you pass 'Blast off!' There are squares with 'oil' and 'fuel'. Cards include 'Fuel taxes, miss three goes' and 'free fuel'. Instead of houses, players build space stations.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation features Strategema, where two players compete to claim territory on rotating holographic boards (somewhat similar to Go). Data attempts to play and learns that his ability to execute countless calculations per second don't match up against the skills of Sirna Kolrami, a noted master. Data realizes he can't win by traditional methods, so he plays to counter Kolrami move for move until Kolrami quits in frustration and Data wins by default.
  • In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Move Along Home", some aliens play a complicated board game where the levels are called "shaps" and you shout, "Allamaraine!" at a certain point. Sisko, Dax, Kira, and Bashir end up sucked into the game.
  • Star Trek: Voyager had Kal-Toh, a Vulcan game where players have to painstakingly rearrange rods from a jumbled pile into an intricate sphere. According to Tuvok, "Kal-toh is to chess as chess is to Tic-Tac-Toe". Tuvok is a master at it and Harry Kim becomes a fan despite always losing.
  • Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Discovery both mention the board game Kadis-kot, a strategy game played with red, green, and orange pieces on a hexagonal board. On Voyager, Kadis-kot is a favorite game of Seven of Nine and Naomi Wildman. On Discovery, Ensign Sylvia Tilly claims to have won the regional Kadis-Kot championship when she was ten years old.
• That's So Raven: In "Four's a Crowd", Tanya and Victor, who wants a night alone, end up getting stuck with Eddie and Chelsea, who play a knockoff of Twister called Contwingo. It apparently runs on points, and on Victor's first move, Eddie pranks him by crushing a water bottle and mimicking the sound of cracking bones, causing Victor to move his hand and hand over points to Eddie and Chelsea.
• In That Mitchell and Webb Look, there's a commercial for Numberwang: The Board Game, which includes two 400-sided dice and a set of thirty-seven dictionary-sized manuals listing what is and is not Numberwang.

Puppet Shows

• In the Sesame Street episode, "Birdie and the Beast", Big Bird plays a board game called Spin the Piggy with the Beast. In this game, each player plays as a pig and takes turns spinning a spinner. When the spinner lands on a number, the player has to move the allotted number of spaces on the board. The first player to make it to the pigsty wins. The Beast wins this game because he doesn't give Big Bird a turn to move his pig.

Tabletop Games

• The Gods of Exalted, and more specifically the Celestial Incarnae, and the Primordials before them, play the Games of Divinity all the time, to the point of neglecting their duties.
• Warhammer 40,000: The background material and novels often reference a chess-like game known as Regicide that is popular with nobles and Astra Militarum officers. There are many different versions of the game, including one that uses a special board that conceals some pieces from the opponent and one that is played on a circular board.

Video Games

• The entire premise of 100% Orange Juice! is that Tomomo pulled all of the Orange_Juice characters and put them all in a board game world that she made up, just to mess with them. The board game in question is about people trying to achieve their objectives, called "norma", by either earning stars or winning battles.
• Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel feature Pazaak, a card game you can play for small amounts of credits. It's a combination of blackjack and poker: you assemble your own deck of +X, -X, and +/-X cards, draw a random hand from it, and use your hand and randomly drawn community cards to get to 20, or as high as you can without going over. The player that does the best wins a round, and a single game is usually best of three, discounting draws.
• League of Legends: Tellstones is a board game of strategy and bluff played throughout Runeterra. Although every culture in Runeterra has its own rules for the game, Demacia's version of the game — also known as "King's Gambit" — is the most well-known one. The game can be played in real life.
• Space Rangers has some text quests based on fictional games, including both reskins and originals. Eeeke Baana is a reskin of Nim. Klugg is a custom-built betting/bluffing game, unique to the universe. Elus is a pattern guessing game, implemented in-universe on a computer. Barabum is a Maloq strategy game that's a version of the fox-and-geese puzzle.

Web Animation

• In RWBY, the team plays a game that is very much like Risk but uses countries, units, and cards based off of Remnant (the show's world).
• One sketch in RWBY Chibi has Jaune trying to introduce his team to a game called Compost King, though they decide it's more fun to just use the game pieces as toys instead.

Webcomics

• The Pastel royal family from Cursed Princess Club enjoy playing a board game titled Thirsty Thirsty Princess, which seems to be a Monopoly clone, with roll-to-move and Random Event cards on them. Instead of paper money, the players exchange pieces of colorful jewelry, like diadems and necklaces, because the Pastel Kingdom seems to use gemstones as its currency (and seeing how the players are all royals, their game money may be made out of actual gemstones). In another strip, they are seen playing a themed Catan clone, titled "The Settlers of Narnia".
• In Outsider, two Loroi pilots are seen playing a game (which seems to be a be a computer version of an existing tabletop game) called "Crossfire." It involves a space battle over a strategically-important station, and players can get extra turns by carefully placing support ships.

Web Video

• The Rhett & Link sketch "Most Complicated Board Game Ever" has Risky Settlers, Knights and Allies of the Lords of Dominion of Earth: Pandemic Edition, a Calvinball-esque mix of bizarre rules and rituals that include DNA swabbing another player and waiting 5 to 10 business days for the results, one player having to retrieve a blooming elderberry from the north-facing slope of a mountain... in real life, a Harlem Shake, and a player having a finger cut off after losing a game of musical chairs. And we only get to see the process of deciding who goes first.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: "Hypno Birthday to You" begins with Carl and Sheen playing a board game called Llama's Day Out.
  Sheen: Seven! Your llama is sucked into a volcanic sinkhole where flesh-eating bats will nip at his screaming face!
  Carl: Sheen, there aren't any volcanic sinkholes in Llama's Day Out.
  Sheen: Maybe that explains why I'm not having fun.
• The Amazing World of Gumball: Gumball and Darwin invent a board game called Dodj or Daar (spelt "Dodge or Dare" until "The Game"). At first, it seems like a simple board game, with the objective of being the first one to cross the finish line, but in "The Game", it's shown to have magical, destructive powers. The players have to complete the dares, otherwise they get one of the dodge cards, which have random effects on the player or environment that are real (such as lava on the floor) and don't wear off until the game is finished.
• Arthur:
  • One of D.W.'s favorite games is Tower of Cows, in which players must stack toy cows as high as they can.
  • "Arthur the Loser" is about a trivia game called No Guessing!, which Arthur hates because he's bad at it.
  • In the opening of "The Substitute Arthur", Buster dreams that he and Arthur are playing a Monopoly-type game called Megalopolis, which also appears in "Francine's Cleats of Strength" and "The Frensky Family Fiasco."
  • In "Sue Ellen Gets Her Goose Cooked", another of D.W.'s favorite games is Confuse the Goose, which Arthur and his friends find babyish, being much more interested in the hot new video game Virtual Goose, which is exactly the same.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, Uncle Iroh is an avid player of Pai Sho, a game that seems to be a combination of Go and Xiangqi. It's also used by members of the Order of the White Lotus to identify one another.
• Bob's Burgers: Gayle has created a board game called Gale Force Winds and has made her family play it before, though everybody hates it. The game's plot involves princess Gayle trying to save multiple kingdoms from a witch, but the rules make no sense and for apparently no reason, the game can just restart from 0.
• Central Park: Season 2 premiers with the Tillerman family at home, during a blackout. Out of options without being able to see their favorite show, they play a board game called "Salem Witch Hunt", a Social Deduction Game, in which players must guess which among them is the witch. Unlike a lot of games of the sort, its implied they only have one chance, and a wrong accusation is an automatic win for the witch.
• Family Guy: In "Petarded", the Griffins and their friends have a game night, and Cleveland brings over a Civil Rights Movement board game called Two Decades of Dignity. Peter gets sent directly to jail for whistling at a white woman.
  Peter: Does anybody ever win at this game?
  Cleveland: You don't win. You just do a little better each time.
• In the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "Bloo Tube", to pass the time on a rainy day, Mac and the Imaginary Friends invent a board game mishmash called For Rat Trap-O-Life, which they make from games such as Forgive Me!, Rat Trap, Duopoly, and Family Life. Bloo, who is upset that the trip to the Monsoon Lagoon Water Park has been cancelled due to the rainstorm, refuses to partake in the game, even when Mac wins the game for him.
• The Ghost And Molly Mcgee: In "Game Night", the McGees get distracted from doing chores by a board game called Mega City, which plays like a complex mix of Monopoly, Jenga, and the Game of Life. Scratch tries to use the McGees' competitiveness at the game to weasel out of having to clean the downstairs bathroom, only to be bested by Sharon, who was a world youth champion of the game back in the nineties who only seemed to have bad luck at the game because she let the other members of the family win.
• Gravity Falls: The beginning of "The Last Mabelcorn" has Dipper and Mabel finding a closet full of old board games that are these. The list of games include "Battle Chutes & Ladder Ships", "Necronomiconopoly", "Don't Wake Stalin", and "Connect Forty-Four". The twins are about to play a Jumanji parody called "What Could Go Wrong?" when Ford calls them into the living room to kick-start the actual plot of the episode.
• Hilda has the game Dragon Panic. The game involves a board with 19 hexagon shaped squares in various colors, a blue and a red dice decorated with symbols (a heart, a # and a shield), and various pieces like pawns and rocks. The exact rules are unknown though.
• The Loud House has several: Pretty, Pretty Pageant Queen, about a beauty pageant, Plumbing Pro, about unclogging a toilet, and The Settlers of Cat-land, about making a cat civilization.
• Muppet Babies (2018):
  • In "The Card Shark", Miss Nanny suggests that the babies pass the time on a rainy day by playing a board game called Coral Land. In this game, each player draws a colored card from the stack, and move to the space corresponding with the color on the card. Pink-colored cards are the best cards, because they let the player take shortcuts across the board. When Piggy wins the game by cheating, the babies pit her against Rizzo, and she is determined to beat him without cheating.
  • In "Animal Loses It", Scooter and Skeeter invent their own board game, Banana Whamma Jungle Jamma, and invite the rest of the babies to play it with them. The goal of the game is for one team to make it to Banana Whamma Falls. Each team has two players, and each team takes turns drawing cards and moving around the board. Some cards allow the team to move forward a select number of spaces, while others cause them to lose a turn or get sent back to Start. When Animal plays the game, he enjoys it at first because he and Piggy get very far into it, but things turn south for him when he loses a turn and gets sent back to start. Having lost games all day, he quits the game out of frustration, but comes back when Miss Nanny teaches him that sometimes playing games with your friends is more important than winning.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Spike and Big Mac play a role-playing game called "Ogres & Oubliettes", which appears to be based on the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. This edition focuses on tactical positioning and relies heavily on the use of a board and miniature figures.
  • When they were young, Starlight Glimmer and Sunburst often played a board game called "Dragon Pit," based on a 1986 children's board game titled Fireball Island. The board has built-in trapdoors that can catch playing pieces if a marble ejected from a central volcano rolls onto them. Twilight remembers playing it as well. Sunburst, Trixie, and Maud Pie eventually put together a life-size version in the library of Twilight's castle so all five can play.
• The main plot of the Phineas and Ferb episode "Skiddley Whiffers" features the the title characters building a life-size version of the titular board game. The gameplay seen consists of players rolling digital-faced dice and moving based on the number rolled, with random effects triggered by non-numerical rolls.
• In the The Ren & Stimpy Show episode "Sven Hoek", Sven and Stimpy play a board game called "Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence." The game has a real electrified fence on the board which is powered by household line voltage. Before finding it, they look at other games with names like "Parcheesy", "Monotony" and "Misery Date."
• Rick and Morty has several.
  • The recurring board game Downbeat, which is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the context of the scene, being a no-stakes break from intense action. Play involves rolling dice and pressing a button and shouting "Downbeat!". The family never gets very far in the game, because someone always has to rush off due to the ongoing adventure.
  • The family (sans Summer and Rick) are also seen playing a game called Don't Punch My Lunch! which appears to be centered around punching a fat construction worker until he "vomits" plastic food pieces.
• Rocko's Modern Life episode "Gutter Balls" sees Mr. Bighead interrupting Rocko, Heffer and Filbert while they're in the middle of a board game. The name of it goes unsaid, but the board has a large spinning monkey prop. And the three are holding red paddles. Parental Bonus, indeed.
• In the Rugrats (1991) episode "The Baby Vanishes", the adults are distracted by a board game called "Neurosis"; it's apparently so difficult and confusing they spend the entire game trying to get through the rule book.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Wild Barts Can't Be Broken", Marge suggests a board game to help the kids take their minds off being under curfew. The choices are all this trope: "Citizenship", "Energy Shortage", "Hippo In The House", and "The Game Of Lent". They decide to play "Hippo In The House", only to find that the hippo is missing from the box.
  • "Brawl In The Family" has them decide to play Monopoly, but having to choose between the real version, Star Wars Monopoly (which is also real), Rasta-Mon-Opoly, Galip-Olopoly, and Edna Krabappoly. Marge elects to play the vanilla game because it's crazy enough.
    Marge: How can an iron be a landlord?!
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Arrgh!", SpongeBob and Patrick play The Flying Dutchman's Treasure, supposedly based on a real treasure map. The goal is to get to the center of the board and dig for treasure. Mr. Krabs becomes obsessed with the game and leads the two on a supposedly real treasure hunt. Krabs' map turns out to be the game board, but as luck would have it, it really is based on a real treasure map, and they find actual buried treasure; too bad the Dutchman came to claim it, and although he rewards SpongeBob and Patrick with gold doubloons, all Krabs gets is a plastic treasure chest game piece.
  • SpongeBob and Patrick play Eels and Escalators in "Sailor Mouth". It's similar to Snakes and Ladders, but with escalators in place of the ladders, eels in place of the snakes, and dice determining which you'll get.
  • In "Patrick: The Game!", Patrick invents the eponymous board game and invites SpongeBob, Squidward, and Sandy to his house to play it. The game plays like a cross between Monopoly and Operation, with Patrick making up the rules as the game progresses. While SpongeBob and Sandy have a lot of fun playing the game, Squidward has the worst luck, continuously landing in jail (and being sent to a real jail when he destroys the game out of anger).
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Mugato, Gumato", Boimler and Rutherford are playing a board game called "Diplomath", which simulates negotiating a business contract with math and graphing involved, where the objective is to close on a deal acceptable to all parties, even if all the players are losing. Their knowledge of the game helps them negotiate with the Ferengi poachers to free their crewmates and convince them to give up poaching and open a preserve for the mugato.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In the episode "Puddle Defender", Star asks Buff Frog to distract Moon so she can sneak out, so Buff Frog suggests that he and Moon play the game Puddle Defender. He is also shown to have other board games that are parodies of real ones: Hungry Hungry Mewmans (Hungry Hungry Hippos), Monstropoly (Monopoly), and Mewman Trap (Mouse Trap).
• Steven Universe: At the start of "The Test", Steven and the Crystal Gems are playing a board game called Citchen Calamity (with that spelling). Pearl lampshades how confusing and bizarre the rules are while playing.

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