The basement of Chronos board game begins
Blog Andrew Joseph 18 Jun , 2025 0
If you scan on the shelves of your local board game store, many famous video game adaptations may be biased towards you. have Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz For example, or Kill the Spire: Board Gamewith many others Board games based on video games. However, one very famous name you won't see is Lara Croft or her beloved Tomb Raider series. It's all about to change for the fan team of the series, but not necessarily what they might think of.
“We want to create a solo board game, and Lara Croft is on a new adventure,” said Luke Meila, the upcoming designer. Tomb Raider: Chronos's Basementexplained to IGN at the booth of the British Olympic Games, boldly supported by Lara Croft’s grumpy gentleman role-playing. “We’ve seen Lala in video games, movies, comics and her adventure experiences, always tailored to the medium, so that’s what we do with it: make board games, as if Lala has been in the board games all the time.”
Tomb Raider: The Ground Nest of Chronos Board Game
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That's the core conceit that promotes the difference solo Melia thinks it is a very bold decision. “There are a lot of franchises that create single player modes in their board game adaptations, but we've never seen a person build a full solo game.” “While there are some great personal games like Descent Sky and Last Girl, there's not that big license. I'm worried that someone will get cold and put pressure on us to turn it into a more traditional multiplayer game.”
Fortunately, this didn't happen, and Melia was free to realize her vision in two different ways, one different way. “There is an adventure book, which is fifteen structured missions,” he said. “It aims to tell the story of how Lara arrives at Kairos Island and the stories she is looking for there. It can teach you how to play with the smallest components.”
Once you are familiar with it, you can enter Campaign. “It's more like an open world, a wider world,” Melia said. This involves moving Lala to a map throughout the island, with different terrain hexagons divided into jungle, desert, mountains and graves. “Each grave has a token on which one hides a map and the other hides the keys,” he added. “When you have both, you get the final mission.”
Each hexadecimal on the map will let you draw a card that shows you how to set a level to play, built from the modular tiles provided in the box. Iterating through this, there are a series of challenges based on the terrain. “The jungle is quite balanced,” Melia said. “The desert is a hot and dangerous open space that requires a lot of traversal, and enemies can see you from faraway places. The grave is more based on puzzles and fewer enemies.”
Putter puzzle In board games, games have always been a double-edged sword. Confusing and strategy feels like a very tight bed effect, but once a puzzle is solved, it makes little sense to do it again, making your game obsolete. Melia found a clever way to solve this problem by making a part of each puzzle highly dynamic.
“So, in this grave, we have to collect a workpiece that is locked behind the door,” he said. “We have a boulder, you have to wander around, you have to try to figure out how to get to the workpiece. So you need to figure out where to place the boulder to access the unlocked corridor and determine the right order to throw the switch. There are two different positions in the game, with different goals and different switches.
Even if you do, Melia designs things so that the game will continue to throw curve balls. “Each grave will be played differently,” he continued. “The events will be different, and the enemies will be different. You will create a plan at the beginning of each grave, but you will have to adjust the plan constantly based on what is happening around you. You may learn to push a boulder, but it will be complicated if the enemy is wandering in the area.”
He spent a lot of time to make sure his invention continues to bother even experienced players. “I tried all sorts of different puzzle options because having an old solution is exactly what I worry about,” he admitted. “I hope it's an endless replay. But we've done a lot of game testing and so far we haven't had a problem, someone has done the same grave twice and each time doesn't feel different. No matter what your plan is, there's enough difference there to throw you away.”
Outside the grave, you face more traditional challenges such as jumping, sneaking and fighting, and the palette of these challenges is processed by six different moves and a pool of six dices that you can spend on to enhance your movements. “You can use as many dice as you want, and the more you use, the stronger it will be,” Melia said. “But once you use all six, it’s your turn.
Once you leave the dice, the enemy will react. “They were driving on the patrol route,” Melia said. Unless you create noise, they go investigate and if they see you, they attack. Then during the event stage you will draw a card. There are many different kinds, such as a dart trap where you have to try dodge, or enemies lay eggs on the board, or reward resources.
In campaign games, enemies not only spawn and move at the level you play, but also on the island map. “On the island, the enemy is Natra, one of the famous villains in the Tomb Raider game,” Melia revealed. “Their invasions are spreading throughout the island and appear more and more every time you run out of the activity card. So if you draw useful activities like bonuses, they get off the deck and the game becomes more and more difficult because enemies appear more often.”
A single task takes about 20 to 60 minutes, so it can take some time to play 15 scenes in adventure mode. But, it’s a little bit shorter in the campaign, allowing you to adjust the whole thing to about three hours of night games. However, the game is still in design, so you can “save” it in your campaign. “We included a saving box,” Melia said. “You put in the stuff you made and it tells you how to save the deck.”
Video game adaptation of desktops always faces the obstacles of copying the screen's twitching action to the more stable speed of the table. That's why Melia tries to focus on the confusing aspects of the franchise, but he makes sure to try to take action in the game to make it as much as those original moves as possible. “You climbed up different levels of terrain in the game,” he explained. “Initially, I did two separate moves and climbed two separate moves because that's how it works in a video game. You parked in front of the wall, jumped down and climbed up. But it wasn't fun on the table, it got in the way. We got them into a fluid action and got the action point to climb up.”
There are many other subtle nods in the original experience, too. “There is a cooperative model called via controller,” Melia said. “You take the dice, turn, and pass it on to another player. My wife and I played a lot and we made a common decision about Lala’s work. Until Lala is surrounded by enemies, we disagree how to take her away!”
After months of design work and internal testing, Melia admitted to being a devotee of the first game and finally tried it with some fans. “They said it felt like an authentic Tomb Raider experience,” he said. “In a puzzle, one of them said it was impossible. It was impossible. I said nothing, I just looked at him reverse engineer until I finally saw it, he smiled, he smiled and solved it. It was great.”
There are no many better moments for game designers, nor will there be a player who loves the series, and you will have the chance to experience it on your desktop soon.
Matt Thrower is a freelance writer at IGN, specializing in tabletop games. You can contact him on the blues @mattthr.bsky.social.