Hypothetical: How would you retheme a game?

I have no idea why Mayfair has released two Empire Builder games in space and one in a fantasy land, yet none set in the Old West.

To me, the empire builder games feel like I'm playing in a living, breathing world and if there were one dipped in sepia tones, set in the American West, and contained all the appropriate trappings as events cards, it would be my dream wild west game.

Yet they release Drunter und Druber as "Wacky, Wacky West".

Million Dollar Mimring wrote: Chaos in the Old World with a Golden Girls retheme.

Chaos In the Gold World, coming from FFG, Gen Con 2015.

Bridge for the Bridge God.

The most obvious retheme in the history of good games is El Grande. The clue is even in the name

"MGM Grand"

get rid of the map of medieval spain. Voila, an overhead stylised map of the more famous Las vegas Casinos chosen to be able to be divvied up into regions that match the original.

Power cards are now bribes, the higher the bribe, the higher up the pecking order in the cards you get to choose. The buttplug king is now the IRS guy or whatever, wherever he is, none of the mob bosses (thats the players) want to risk putting their dudes to work, so they all move out (therefore to adjacent areas, hence the rule on placement).

The castillo, whatever, make it "jail", having your guys in there and keeping "quiet" gives you rep/influence (instead of VP), and then you get to put them "to work"

the game would work exactly as it does now, except replacing the map, using some poker chip or betting token for the king. Change the power cards to actual fucking playing cards, wey hey, they go from 1 to 13 too. Fiddle with the names of the action cards to deal with mobs, cops, whatever. cubes can represent your muscle in the casinos or your influence in the running of them or your take, whatever.


Not that EG needs a retheme, but at one point while I was waiting to get hold of a reasonably priced copy again, it was an easy way to make a free print and play version with some cards, poker chips and a printout from google maps.

I retheme games a lot. Mostly because I am very critical of how games are produced, and I beleive that the best way to complain is to put my money where my mouth is, and create.

I think rethemeing is difficult if you were to be a game producer as a profession as it can wrack your brain quite a bit. Your theme matches the mechanisms perfectly, except for one tiny thing that seems out of place and you struggle for a thematic way to rationalize it within the confines of the setting.
It is a great creative exercise though.

The process has an "aha" moment where you just know a certain theme would be better implemented onto a design than what is currently present.

For example, my current huge retheme is Krosmaster Arena. I was just wondering one day how being a lumberjack in that game, getting monetary rewards for felling trees in a combat skirmish game, was even remotely relevant.... when the query hit me.
Q: What genre is not only lauded but rewarded for destruction of terrain?
A: Kaiju

So I ran some quick numbers of comparison in my head. How many figs in krosmaster, would be how many I would need for the Kaiju (Monpoc was my savior here), how difficult would it be for me to completely redesign the graphics of the game considering how many components there are, etc.

It turns out, that even though its not a small task, it was one that was simple enough for me to tackle with my amateur skills.

Plus, it filled the role of "light skirmish game" with a kaiju theme I was longing for since the release of Monpoc was announced (great game, but definitely not light).

Retheming is a hobby unto itself, and I think it stems from my miniature wargaming background where one must go through inordinate amounts of enslaved drudgery on the models, boards, terrain in order to even play their first game. Without that background, I doubt I would be so patiently inclined towards the idea of extensive rethemes.

As far as what other popular games would work with a different theme, I have a huge list from the past 5 years. Here is a short version:
Survive! with a dune theme. Escape from Arrakeen. Each player takes a group of 12 atreides and flees from Arrakeen city during the Harkonnen/Corrino double cross, the city slowly erodes as harkonnen saboteur atomics are destroying hexes every turn, dumping people into the sands of arrakis and making them susceptible to attack by fremen and worms. The game ending when the orbital bombardment lasers are activated from guild heighliners from orbit.
Fremen = sharks
Sandwork = Sea Monster
Ornithopters = boats
Bene gesserit = dolphins (if you're into that sort of thing, I personally hate using dolphins in survive)
Harkonnen gunships = whales
The implementation was only hampered by a distinct lack of usable miniatures in plastic for this job. Never completed, sadly. Would kick baby puppies for this to see the light of day.

Roma/ roma II into a magical combat game. Completed.

Cosmic Encounter with a lovecraftian conspiracy theme. You choose an elder power, have your robed minion running around trying to gain control of various arkham locations. This one was completed.

Doom the boardgame into a 2 player fantasy dungeon crawl. Completed.

Nexus Ops into a 16th century japanese game of controlling daimyos. Completed.
Nexus Ops using starcraft theme. completed.

Kemet into a generic spacehip game. In progress. I was going to go with a specific theme (star wars, BSG, etc), but dont care enough to be specific for my own sake.