The Game Designer's Guide to Creating Licensed Tabletop Games

By: James Sheahan

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eText | 14 May 2026 | Edition Number 1

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This book explains the steps in creating a licensed tabletop game and the factors which influence its design using examples, including the designer's first-hand experience of converting the Fallout videogames into Fallout: Wasteland Warfare.

Converting an existing property, such as a videogame or film, into a tabletop game provides all the challenges of tabletop design whilst adding many more challenges, restrictions, limitations, and pressures. This book covers all the necessary topics, such as:

Gaining a license and working with a licensor
Identifying boundaries the license creates, which defines the design space in which the game must exist
Studying the IP's setting to understand what the tabletop game can be, how to extract principles and details from that setting, and the important challenges that must be resolved
Addressing the inevitable changes to the source material that must occur when adapting to the tabletop medium
Creating the game mechanics - the most fundamental building blocks of all - and imbuing them with the license to portray the IP's characters, action, and atmosphere.

The book takes the reader through the process of designing a licensed tabletop game and explains how a license adds opportunities to be embraced and challenges to be overcome. Using behind-the-scenes knowledge of creating licensed games, the experience, insights, and lessons learned from a career in games will assist and inspire readers to bring a licensed world to life.

This book will be ideal reading for games professionals looking to learn best practices for designing games based on existing properties.