Funko Games VP Deirdre Cross Breaks Down Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar’s Approach to Storytelling

Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar offers an incredibly rich and varied experience for fans of the franchise as well as those new to board games, and the great news is the game is completely funded and has soared past its initial Kickstarter goal of $100,000. If you’ve been on the fence, however, we’ve got a conversation that might help you decide if the game is for you, as ComicBook.com had the chance to speak with Vice President of Funko Games Deirdre Cross all about the game, including how it embraces the famous franchise, what fans can expect from the game, and what led to Funko Games jumping into the Legacy genre.

First I wanted to talk a bit about the Legacy aspect of the game and what led to Funko Games jumping into the genre, and it’s something that’s been in the planning stages for quite some time. “I think for us, we are all at Prospero Hall and Funko Games, huge fans of Legacy Gaming, and so, we all play those games with our friends and our families and it’s something we’ve been kicking around for a very long time,” Cross said.

“What took so long? Well, as you know, games take a long time to make in general and a Legacy game, we worked on it for many years, but it’s so great to be a part of Funko, and I mean, as you can see from this amazing store, it’s like, you want to do something that really celebrates your fandom and what you love. Let’s go for it, let’s make this happen, and it was really a blank slate kind of moment, just go for it,” Cross said.

Funko Games has a number of beloved franchises under its umbrella, which now includes Jurassic World, and in all of those cases and proposals for future franchises, creating a story that fits within the world and captures what is so magical about that franchise is key.

“Well, as we were thinking about making a Legacy game, you need a story that’s really big. Because we really try to tell the story of whatever fandom we’re doing, if that’s Panam, or if that’s Back to the Future, or if it’s Jurassic World, the whole universe of Jurassic World, it’s the scale of the thing because Jurassic World, actually covers decades of content, right? 30, 40 years, if you go all the way to Hammond’s inception of the park, and so it has the depth to carry us through huge 12 adventures,” Cross said.

Like its previous work in The Goonies Board Game, Jurassic World works in original storytelling and original characters into the mix, and it’s a bit of a balancing act to figure out how much new content should be included compared to closely recreating the property.

“Yeah. I think it’s a dance that we do with every property that we try to figure out how much develops on the tabletop while you’re playing it,” Cross said. “And how much is beat for beat from the film or the story. And that is like I said, it’s a dance and it depends on the property. And what kind of other materials are around that fandom too”

Now, you might expect the biggest challenge to be something related to the development of Jurassic World’s gameplay or creating all the components, and while those certainly presented their own hurdles, just getting a game to the finish line at all during the pandemic is a victory in itself.

“I would say the biggest challenge was having a pandemic in the middle of the development. You could imagine that this is a little bit of a wrinkle where we’re all like, here we go and we’re kicking things off with Universal and it’s like, womp, womp, womp everybody go home. It’s like, oh my gosh, and how to pivot all of our development, our playtesting, our fabrication. How do you do all of this from that new environment? And I think for us, that was the biggest challenge, but working our way through that, figuring out how to do things differently. Like so many others have had to do during this time. It might have made it even better actually for that,” Cross said.

You can check out our full review of Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar right here, and if you want to find out even more about the game you can head over to the official Kickstarter page here.

What do you think of Jurassic World: The Legacy of Isla Nublar? Let us know in the comments or as always you can talk all things tabletop with me on Twitter @MattAguilarCB!