The Cake is Not a Lie: The Portal Board Game is Coming

Last week news leaked out that there was a Portal board game in development at Valve. At the time this was about all the news there was, so we didn’t report it as it would have been just a headline! However, this week Polygon.com has got their hands on the full scoop.

Portal: The Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game is the provisional title for the game being published by Cryptozoic Games and has two to four players attempt to get their test subjects into the finest test chambers while attempting to foil the opposing players’ experiments. If you’re not familiar with Portal you may not realise that this is accomplished by killing the test subject. If you are a fan of Portal then you’ve probably just realised you’ll be playing the game as GladOS and just started doing a little nerdy happy dance.

So it’s all going to be super nerdy awesome then? Well the one slight issue here may be Cryptozoic, although they make a huge amount of great looking licenced games very few of them end up being great games. However, the story is that Cryptozoic have had minimal effort in the game’s development. Whether the folks at Valve are good at board game development remains to be seen.

 
Last year I wrote an article on which video game licences I’d love to see made into board games and the thought of a Portal board game never came to mind. In retrospect it’s a simple but good idea, Portal is full of logic puzzles, even if they involve bending 3 dimensional spaces and the humour is universal.

The Portal board game is due for release at the end of 2014.