Ludic Interaction in Doctor Who - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 166

Figure 8.2 Interactive game board. Doctor Who: he Time Travelling Action Game
©Toy Brokers Ltd., 2007. Photo by the author.
where tokens can be won or lost, and “time portals,” which allow the player to
bypass the normal movement route (Figure 8.2).
All the elements of the game match Doctor Who precisely—the images on
the cards are from the series, the playing pieces feature a lovely image of David
Tennant, and the TARDIS is accurate in terms of sound and shape. However,
the game simply does not feel like Doctor Who when one is playing it. For
example, the Doctor rarely travels around the universe looking for ights. Rather,
he attempts to solve his problems peacefully instead of combating aliens. he
distribution of alien power is also somewhat random. Both the Slitheen, a race of
farting green alien scavengers, and the Reaper, a giant creature that lives outside
time and space and can destroy a planet, are defeated using three energy tokens.
In the diegesis of Doctor Who , a Slitheen would be powerless compared to a
Reaper. Similarly, both a Cyberman drone, a member of a cyborgian race, and
he Beast, a humongous manifestation of the Devil itself, are defeated with six
energy tokens. Even at their most powerful, the Cybermen would never be on
equal footing with the Devil itself.
Rather than esoteric semantics about Doctor Who , these are crucial details for
fans. hey simply ring false for the series, and alienate the player of the paratextual
game from the Doctor Who universe. Although this looks like the Doctor, he does
not act like the Doctor. he Time Travelling Action Game is not a ludic interaction
with the series—semantic elements are carried over but the syntactics that create
meaning with those elements are not. At the same time, the rules of the game
ofer a note that hints toward a more active player interaction with the game.
Unusually for a paratextual board game, the Time Travelling Action Game rules