Essay 2: Chess is a Boxed RPG

This essay is the second in a series of essays about repurposing board games for RPGs. I wrote it as part of the design process for Violent Delights: A chess-based RPG about Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. The Rise of the Boxed RPGBoxed RPGs have been around for a while. Consider the legendary 1988 Bullwinkle and Rocky Role-Playing Party Game, which came with cards, character stand-ups, spinners, and hand puppets. And yet the last few years have seen the rise of boxed and custom card-based RPGs in games from For the Queen (2019) to Mothership (2024), a trend that has been singled out frequently in tabletop RPG media over the last year or so. In November of 2025, Quinns Quest covered boxed games like Desperation, Tacklebox, City of Winter, and Lovecraftesque. Quinns joined Sam Dunnewold for Mausritter month to discuss the sword-and-whiskers boxed set on Dice Exploder. And Aaron King and Maxwell Lander covered an additional eight boxed RPGs — beyond those already listed — in the sixth…