Two indie games are being adapted for the tabletop: Party House, one of the titles bundled inside UFO 50, is becoming a deckbuilder, while the 2019 rule-rewriting puzzler Baba Is You is being turned into a competitive board game. A Kickstarter campaign funding both will begin on September 15.
In the original Party House, players throw parties and try to attract VIP guests without drawing the attention of the police or the fire department. Success depends on balancing how many guests are invited against the risk of the party being broken up, with cash and popularity earned along the way. Which guests turn up is partly random, and between parties players spend cash at a shop to enlarge the house or add new guests to their roster.
How the adaptations differ
Party House: The Deckbuilding Game reworks several of those systems for a table.
- Support for up to four players
- Money and popularity merged into a single currency
- House capacity and the bust threshold folded into one stat called Trouble
- Players must move to the shopping phase once they exceed seven Trouble during a party
Baba Is You: The Board Game takes a different route, converting a single-player puzzle game about rewriting its own rules into a competitive one. Players race to connect an "Is You" descriptor with an "Is Win" descriptor, borrowing the video game's central conceit that the rules themselves are objects on the board.
Both adaptations involve their original creators. Jon Perry, who developed UFO 50's Party House, designed the deckbuilder. Baba Is You designer Hempuli Oy worked on the board game alongside Peter C. Hayward, designer of That Time You Killed Me, with Bitewing Games publishing.
Polygon, which reported the adaptations, described neither game as an obvious candidate for a tabletop conversion while arguing that both suit the format. No pricing, component details or delivery estimates have been announced ahead of the September 15 campaign launch.
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