Video Game Champion

TackTurn · 2024

Editing German after translation French to English to German

Video Game Champion is all about diving back into the video game era of your early adolescence, which only applies if you’re a real Xennial whose adolescence took place in the 1990s. Alternatively, you could use it to showcase the glorious golden age of console video games to your children, I guess? Mechanically, the game is built around set collection and action resolution and requires players to choose from a supply of controllers, chores, games and game magazines in order to beat their opponents in final scoring. There are lots of great ideas here, from helping your grandparents with shopping for some extra pocket money to needing the right set of controllers (think: button combos) for completing a game to the excellent video game covers that perfectly capture the era’s aesthetic. All in all, the game is hampered somewhat by its excessive table footprint and the riotous sensory onslaught of all that colour. The rulebook is also a bit awkward and lacking in presentation, but once again, this project required translation without access to a laid-out, print-ready source copy. As such, and because the original translation was frankly pretty shoddy, my efforts at ‘upcycling’ the rulebook were limited to ironing out actual errors and getting references and expressions to match the lingo I remember from Germany in the 1990s. Side note: I got to chat with the designer Patrick Matheus at SPIEL ‘24, which was cool.