Joseph King of Dreams - Art to board games

ODBG 0016 - How to turn Dreamwork's Joseph into a Board Game.

What is Joseph?

Joseph is the “king of dreams”. A favourite son of Jacob and sold into slavery by his brothers.

He is the one whose light still shone even when he doubted his faith. His dreams were visions and he learned to interpret their meaning. This then impressed the Pharaoh so much that he was taken out of slavery and saved all of Egypt.

After overcoming such adversity his brothers come to Egypt to ask for aid from him and he seeks revenge framing one of them as a thief. He asks his brothers to prove that their other “new” brother is real and then they bring Jacob (there younger brother) to prove they're not liars and… Joseph forgives his brothers.

How to turn Joseph into a game?

Well you have to look at what is the core of Joseph and you could take 2 approaches. Firstly you could create a game where you have to hone your skill at interpreting dreams so that you win the Pharaoh's favour. Secondly you could explore how being sold into slavery and hardship humbled Joseph and helped him to strengthen his faith.

…But how to do it?

I reckon if you wanted to create a game that focused on interpretation of dreams there must be dreams to interpret. These could be cards that have dice requirements to solve and understand. Or perhaps they could contain riddles which can be randomly effected and after understanding the riddle you need to work out what the dream means. They could almost be question and answer cards with a twist. The twist being that after solving the riddle you must successfully interpret it by matching the right symbols and conveying its meaning to another player.

Maybe all players do this in secret to place their dice or tokens in order to see their understand the riddle as well as the others.

Perhaps they are limited in what they can say when the dream appears with a timer. They might earn prestige from doing it first and most accurately - this could then be used at the end to give them extra chances or the first shot at interpreting Pharaoh's dream. They could earn even more prestige if they are the only player to interpret it correctly.

Summary of what type of game it would be.

It would be a simultaneous competitive game, where each player is battling to be the best dream interpreter to then (after a few dreams) be selected by Pharaoh, Attempt to win their freedom and save Egypt by successfully interpreting his dream.

How would you keep replayability once players have tried it?

That is a great question and I don't fully have the answer. For example, you could create more dream cards and pharaoh dream cards so that the game is never stale. Or perhaps on the dream cards it tells you what dream dice need rolling and that could affect it. There's many possibilities.

However, that's my thoughts on how it could be done. As you can probably tell the Animated film Joseph is one of my favourites and not just because of the music but the story. I find it really fascinating.

Thanks for reading.

Sam

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