Trickerion and Anachrony film rights sold to studio producing Terraforming Mars for cinema
Small boards, big screens.
Two more board games have joined the growing roster of titles with big screen potential. The film rights to Trickerion: Legends of Illusion and Anachrony were recently sold to production company Cobalt Knight under the auspices of future adaptations.
The April 11th sale saw Cobalt Knight acquire the rights from tabletop publisher Mindclash Games, who is also responsible for this year’s science fiction 4X board game Voidfall and 2022’s Astra. A press release did not contain any firm plans at the moment, nor whether players and fans should expect to see them on the small screen or in cinemas.
You might recall Cobalt Knight as the entity currently shopping popular board game Terraforming Mars as somewhere between The Martian and The Expanse, co-founder Christopher Kaminski told Dicebreaker earlier this year. He also mentioned that the project will likely focus on original protagonists created for the sake of selling Terraforming Mars’ themes of corporate interaction to a broader audience.
Terra Mystica is the other board game recently added to Cobalt Knight’s burgeoning portfolio of rights, but it remains an open question how any of these will turn out. Anachrony’s far-future apocalyptic scenario would make for a striking setting, to say nothing of the time travelling, cryptic messages from the future and mysterious alien materials arriving via asteroids.
Trickerion: Legends of Illusions, on the other hand, takes place in an alternate 19th century that blends stage illusionists with actual supernatural elements. Players don the mantle of rival performers reaching for fame, riches and actual magical power, which could easily translate into a character-driven drama tinged with some speculative elements and plenty of intrigue.
“Even with all the energy and love put into Trickerion (our first board game), coming from a first creator, its groundbreaking success at the time was either a miracle, a manifestation of true magic, or a remarkable coincidence,” said designer Richard Ámann. “With the possibility of our beloved universe coming alive as a motion picture, I have no more doubts that magic is present in our world, and I’m sure Cobalt Knight knows how to wield it.”
Trickerion was designed by Ámann, along with Viktor Péter, and found immediate success in 2015. Those two then joined with Dávid Turczi to design and publish Anachrony in 2017, and it enjoyed a similar level of popularity among hobby enthusiasts. Both still enjoy a fairly high placing on BoardGameGeek’s Hotness list - for those who put stock in such things - and hint at a possible reason why they were targeted by Cobalt Knight for film adaptation in the first place. Dicebreaker has reached out for more information.