Tile Town kicks off with licensed sets centred around Bluey and Jurassic World. These will launch in October alongside Pet Clinic and Fire Station themes, with more to follow.

“We’re adding the Moose wow to the building playset category” said John Coyne, Chief Brand Officer at Moose Toys.

“We took a new approach to the category with magnetic tiles that can be used to build recognisable playsets that have incredibly unique play features and characters for kids to interact with. It’s all about the simplicity of ‘click, build, play.’”

Tile Town features magnetic “action tiles” and figures. When the special magnetic figures are played on an action tile, it activates movements such as blasting a water cannon, opening doors, dancing and other theme-specific actions.

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It’s also a big year for Funko Games, and the firm has both bases covered – with E.T.: Light Years From Home bringing the classic Spielberg film to the tabletop, while Jurassic World gets the legacy game treatment in Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar.

We spoke with Deirdre Cross, VP at Funko Games, and Josh Manderville, Art Director at Funko Games, to find out more about the design process behind these two new titles.

Guys, it’s always great to connect. Let’s dive straight into some of your new games… E.T.: Light Years from Home.
Deirdre Cross, VP, Funko Games: Yes, we’re very excited to be partnering with Universal again, this time celebrating E.T. The Extra-terrestrial and the 40th anniversary of a film that we all grew up with. It really holds a special place in our heart, and we were excited to get the opportunity to bring it to the tabletop so that fans and their families can immerse themselves in this great story.

Had an E.T. game been on the bucket list for a while?
DC: Yeah! We make a lot of licensed games and we have a soft spot for Eighties cinematic adventures. E.T. had been on my list for a very long time, I don’t know about you Josh?

Josh Manderville, Art Director, Funko Games: Yes, I’m a huge Amblin fan in general. Working on games for The Goonies, Back to the Future and this have been dream projects for me. And E.T. is interesting because it is very much a Spielberg film, but it also feels like quite a personal piece for both him and fans. There’s a lot of heart in the film, and capturing that in the game was a challenge, but I’m very proud of what we’ve created.

The art style for this game feels inspired by those classic Eighties movie posters. Was that the inspiration?
JM: The automatic ‘go to’ for inspiration is the movie posters – and the Amblin art, especially the work of Drew Struzan. Universal shared a lot of his watercolour art with us and it was beautiful. So it was about trying to find artists who work in that kind of traditional style, which is tough because most artists work digitally these days.

Also, we look at the era in which these movies were created. With the Eighties, people think of neon and VHS tapes, but that stuff came in towards the end of the Eighties. In the early Eighties, there was still a lot of bleed over from the Seventies, so you had a lot of watercolour and warm, earthy palettes.

I actually looked at a lot of Atari boxes and Atari artists like Cliff Spohn and Rick Guidice. E.T. is also one of the most notorious video games of the Eighties, so it made sense to glean something artistically from it! We ultimately wanted to create a look that was true to the film and true to the era.

And Deirdre, this is another example of you guys taking a mainstream beloved IP and incorporating tabletop game mechanics. How do you walk that tightrope between creating something that pleases E.T. fans and tabletop fans, without alienating those new to these kinds of games?
DC: ‘Alienating’ – I see what you did there!

Ha! Finally, I’m appreciated!
DC: Ha! Well, anytime we’re translating a film to the tabletop – especially if it has this kind of legacy – we think about people who maybe haven’t played anything new since they learned Clue 30 years ago. We want to make sure the rules are very straightforward – and that includes the incredible work that Josh does on the layout and design of the rules.

We try to make the process around getting started very simple. In our set-up for the game, it goes through the set-up of the components and then it says ‘now watch this video on how to play.’ You can read the rest of the rulebook, or you can consult it after you watch the short video. We look for ways to get people in as fast as possible.

We also have a leg up when it comes to teaching people a new game mechanic they may have never played before by closely tying the mechanic to the story. Our game is based around the scene when the kids are dashing to get E.T. to the clearing to get him home.

By basing our game on this beloved scene, you understand your motivation and why you’re doing what you’re doing in the game. As long as we’re true to that, and we make the right decisions for each story, it helps make it easier for new people to play the game, especially if they’re coming to this just because they love E.T.

You guys make everything from light card games to big box games. What dictates where you go with a brand? Why go down this route for an E.T. game versus a party game, for example?
DC: In this case, Universal specifically wanted a Prospero Hall-style game. They thought we did a beautiful job with Back to the Future so they wanted another game where fans could really sink into the world and the story of the movie.

With E.T., where there any tough nuts during the development process that you’re especially proud to have cracked?
DC: E.T. is the original ‘kids on bikes’ film, so we knew we needed to include that in some way, but we needed to make the bikes consequential. So in the game, there’s an E.T. piece that fits into the kids’ baskets. He can fit into any bike’s basket, and the bases of the bike pieces actually fit together.

We thought: ‘If they have E.T. with them, they should be able to fly, right?’ So in the game, if you have E.T. with you – either solo or together as a group – you can fly around the board. It wasn’t enough to have a cardboard mover – we wanted a 3D piece that could carry E.T. and bring the story viscerally to life.

And Josh, were there any tricky problems to solve on the art side of things?
JM: The bike sequence in the movie starts at dusk and ends at night, with the spaceship landing in the forest. So, in our game, we couldn’t have the spaceship land in daylight, and we couldn’t have kid riding their bikes at night… That was a problem to solve!

And what was the solution?
JM: With the watercolour art being a transitional colour palette, we were able to start players in daylight and end the game at night in the forest. You get that transition as you play. We had to make it feel immersive, organic and game-y.

Of course! That’s a very smart, stylish solution. It looks great. Now, while I’ve got you, I also wanted to ask about your upcoming legacy game, Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar. For anyone that hasn’t seen this yet, what do they need to know?
DC: Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar is coming to Kickstarter on March 22nd. This game is a legacy game that starts before the first Jurassic Park film. You get to build the park how you would like, before playing through the entire Jurassic World franchise. You’ll find out if you’d make better decisions than the people in the films!

It takes place over 12 legacy adventures, and the grand finale is endlessly replayable. Oh, and each story takes around two hours to play, so you get between 24 and 30 hours of legacy adventures to play through.

Amazing. Why opt for Kickstarter?
DC: Well, we’ve worked on Jurassic Park games in the past, with games like Funkoverse: Jurassic Park, so this is a sandbox we can’t stay away from! When we had the opportunity to talk with Universal about making a legacy game, we knew we wanted to make it big – but we had no idea how big it would become!

Once it started to reach a certain scale, we realised we needed to go to Kickstarter to have that conversation with the consumer about what’s in this game and how awesome it’s going to be.

Josh, the art of this game doesn’t look like any sort of movie poster. What direction did you opt to go down for this?
JM: I should start by saying I’m not the art direction lead for this game, but I had plenty of input. We started by tapping into old issues of Scientific American, adventure magazines, and certainly movie posters too. The result was a game that has a distinct 1950s pulp fiction vibe but is also uniquely its own.

DC: In addition to the inspiration from fictional materials, the game’s board is inspired by Hawaiian tourism pamphlets and maps from the same era. As our designer Jordan Christianson likes to say — we wanted the game to feel like you just unearthed a dead stock game from the mid-century, found buried in your grandparents’ attic. It’s an unopened treasure and a time capsule of sorts.

Designing a legacy game sounds like a bit of a mind-melting experience, with all the different decisions and directions you have to map out. How was the development process?
DC: We started work on this well before the pandemic, and it’s been a very interesting process. There’s lots of playable characters that come in and out, and the duration of the project ensured we could really explore all the threads we wanted to include. Then we played it and played it and played it.

With something like our E.T. game, you play it, make a change and then play it again. With this game, you change something and it’s just like Ian Malcolm says in the film: “A butterfly can flap its wings in Peking and in Central Park you get rain instead of sunshine.” We’d flap our wings in chapter one of the game and chapter 12 would go crazy!

It was an exhaustive, exhausting design process and the design team left it all on the field; it’s fantastic.

Was another benefit of the legacy format that you could give all the iconic moments from across the entire franchise movies their time in the sun?
DC: Yes, that’s very true. The way the game is engineered, there are key events that come out in every chapter. Some are things you’d expect: problems with the fences, an escaped T-Rex… So yes, we can shine a spotlight on those things, but you’re making different decisions than what they make in the film.

So when the power goes out, your T-Rex might not escape because you might’ve reinforced the fence! Your story may play out very differently.

So there’s a chance that, through certain decisions, I could play the game and Jeff Goldblum keeps his shirt on?
JM: Well once its off, it’s off for the entire game! It’s a legacy game!

He’s going to be absolutely freezing!
DC: Ha! Look, it’s a legacy game, I’m not going to spoil anything!

Yes, don’t ruin anything! Guys, as always, this has been fun. Good luck with the Kickstarter campaign, and with the launch of E.T.: Light Years From Home. Let’s catch up again soon!

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Invented by the Prospero Hall team at Funko Games, Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar launches on Kickstarter on March 22nd, 2022, and takes players through storylines found in all five films in the Jurassic World franchise.

Over the course of 12 adventures, players will transform Isla Nublar, build their own theme parks and breed new dinosaurs. Being a legacy game, each decision made during play will uniquely and permanently affect the course of the game.

“We always aim to create games we want to play around stories and characters we love most,” said Deirdre Cross, Vice President of Prospero Hall.

“This project has been in development for years, which has allowed us to experiment and innovate. We believe we are redefining the legacy game genre in a way that will surprise and delight tabletop and Jurassic World fans.”

Check out a first look at the game in the video below:

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What’s the road not taken then, Al? If this wasn’t your job, what would you want to have done instead?
Great question… As a young kid, I always had dreams of joining the RAF as a pilot and saving the world. Maybe I watched too many reruns of Top Gun at the time! But as I entered my teens, I really enjoyed two subjects: economics and design. Thankfully, I chose design for which I had a real passion, especially at the start of my GCSEs due to a great teacher.

The right teacher can make all the difference. Growing up, what was your favourite toy or game?
I had a few toys that I remember favourably as a child. The toy that I was most fond of was a 1982 Hotwheels Pontiac Trans-Am. I used to carry it everywhere I went, and remember constantly playing with it on my grandparents’ sofa. I’d treat the 80’s fashion of floral sofa patterns as roadblocks and parking spaces to manoeuvre in and out of. I also loved Centurions by Kenner. Max Ray was my favourite! As I got older, and LCD games became popular, TOMY’s Tronic 3D Shark Attack was another one of my standouts.

Some great answers! And let’s stay with this… We know that, as a child, you used to physically dismantle Tonka Toys and put them back together again… Do you still break things apart to see how they work?
Absolutely. Breaking toys apart to see how they work provides so much insight and helps generate ideas and solutions for future product development. It lets you marvel at the clever, simple engineering that you not only learn from, but also helps you appreciate the intelligence in which the Toy Industry relies on. As the industry is increasingly challenged on pricing and value, learning how products work is an absolute must for all toy designers.

In terms of the industry, your jobs and brands include Hasbro, Golden Bear, Vivid, Mattel, Disney, TOMY… Given that, what advice would you give your younger self if you could?
I’ve been very lucky to work on a variety of amazing products, with amazing people and amazing companies throughout my career. The best advice I’d offer my younger self is to keep practicing your craft. Only do things that make you happy, allow yourself to perform at your very best and always be open to learn and try new things. Also, be grateful to the mentors that provided you with the training, vision and inspiration to get you where you are today.

In terms of your personal creativity, you’ve spoken about how you travel, visit retail and play with your kids. What else inspires you?
I’m a really visual person and embarrassingly, I don’t read as much as I should. Nearly all of my inspiration comes from simply looking at things – whether in real life or digitally – and asking myself the really simple question: is this interesting enough for a child to positively notice?

You’ve also mentioned – very much in passing – your idea book. Tell us about that: what happens when something’s caught your attention?
When I spot something interesting or have a creative brainwave, I take a picture, save a link, write it down, sketch it or make a sound recording straightaway… I have quite a short-term memory! Then I simply show it to my kids for their immediate response.

A stringent filter!
Very much so! And anything that filters through then goes into some further thinking time to see if there’s a product possibility. As I’m getting older, I’m realising the beauty in simplicity and focusing my efforts on how to innovate with straightforward ‘ingredients’. It’s a challenge, but I look at the most loved toys in the world and the simple innovation that always captures the audience imagination and love for toys.

Well, let’s look at an example of that… This June sees you releasing a new line of licensed preschool toys for the Toomies brand. Working with Universal Brand Development, you’re launching Jurassic World items… Chase & Roll Raptors, Spin & Hatch Dino Eggs, a Pic & Push T-Rex… Tell me about these!
There are probably five movies in my lifetime that I’ve been to the cinema multiple times to watch… And Jurassic Park is proudly a part of those five.

I’m with you. Great film. Brilliantly made, fantastic premise and – at the time – the closest we’d ever been to seeing real dinosaurs!
And dinosaurs are such a classic part of a child’s life from a very young age. So when developing this exciting new range, we were finishing our new Jurassic Park line, which expanded our famous eggs into a complete, interactive world. We wanted to define what direction we could take the line down in the future. It was after a conversation with Alpana Virani at UK Toy Fair that an immediate memory of the egg incubator sparked from the first movie. And I just thought, wow, Jurassic World and Hide and Squeak Toomies could be awesome.

To read the full interview on our sister site Mojo Nation click here

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