The miniature masters at Titan Forge also have something big up their sleeves

The past five years of board game innovation have proven that video game licenses can stand up to the best the tabletop has to offer. Look no further than Dorfromantik, the breakout indie hit that lit up the charts on Steam when it was released in 2022. In 2023, its tabletop interpretation, Dorfromantik: The Board Game, won the Spiel des Jahres, arguably the most prestigious award in all of board gaming.

For 2024, it seems that many more developers in the board game world suddenly want to throw their hat in the ring with their own high-profile video game crossovers. Studios are developing projects based on other indie hits, such as Dead Cells, as well as the best-selling franchise in video game history, Activision's juggernaut Call of Duty. Iceland's CCP Games also wants a piece of the action. The crowdfunding campaign for Eve: War for New Eden goes live today, and Polygon sat down with the developers at Titan Forge to learn more.

Eve Online is one of the most notoriously complex games ever created, one part aerospace economics simulation, one part social experiment, and two parts spreadsheet in space. But beneath the layers that obscure it, Eve is deadly: It's a competitive 4X game where players explore a universe, exploit it for resources, expand their empires, and eradicate the opposition. It's a beloved genre with a history as rich on the tabletop as it is in video games. But to include all the same features wholesale in a board game would be madness. Instead, the team at Titan Forge is planning something on a slightly different scale.