Deadly Premonition: The Board Game seems toned down from the original

Rising Star Games has opened up Deadly Premonition: The Board Game, the surprising evolution of the memorably bizarre survival horror game, for crowdfunding on Kickstarter. With a $50,000 goal already cleared, fans of the 2010 cult favorite have until June 8 to decide if the tabletop is a suitable new home for Deadly Premonition.

First details for Deadly Premonition: The Board Game seem to emphasize the original game’s murder mystery elements. Up to four players work as detectives, who compete to discover which of the other ones is the true killer in the group. To figure that out, they’ll investigate a group of suspects for information and dole out evidence that supports their theory.

That all sounds like fairly typical stuff, but there are some unique effects carried over from Deadly Premonition. Weather cards can change the whole dynamic — if it starts raining, for example, the real killer will emerge and take out a suspect. Rain similarly was omnipresent in the Pacific Northwestern-set Deadly Premonition, so it’s a subtle callback to the game’s unique mood.

Original designer Swery is on board to further steer the ship so that the board game doesn’t lose too much of what made Deadly Premonition popular. If the $125,000 stretch goal is hit, he’ll even design new playable characters for the board game, which otherwise borrows the video game’s cast. But a lot of what defined the game was its hilarious writing. Scenes like this helped bring Deadly Premonition into meme culture:

The board game is only in its earliest stages, so it’s hard to really gauge how weird it gets. It seems unlikely that it will reach the absurdist heights of Deadly Premonition. Anyone who happens upon The Board Game without having played its Windows PC and Xbox 360 counterpart can pick up a key for The Director’s Cut by pledging $30 or more to the campaign; rewards, including the board game itself, are expected by this December.