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Synthesis

5 Heat-Caliber Translation Candidates

What the analysis surfaced and what to do with it. Each candidate has a full deep-dive in notes/; this report compares them side-by-side and recommends a build path.

What we did

  1. Scraped BGG top 5,000+ games via the (now Bearer-auth-gated) XML API → SQLite (data/bgg.sqlite)
  2. LLM-extracted design primitives for the top 100 by rank, using parallel Claude Code subagents and a v2 schema that distinguishes direct_digital_port from closest_loop_translation
  3. Ranked candidates where (a) BGG quality is high, (b) no port exists, (c) no other game has translated the loop, (d) confidence is high, (e) Easy/Medium difficulty — see reports/showcase.md
  4. Spawned full Heat-style deep-dives on the top 5 Tier-1A candidates

The 5 deep-dives, side by side

GameDifficultyBayesHookKiller feature for mobileTop risk
Heat: Pedal to the MetalEasy7.79Gear-shift hand management + heat-card deck pollution + corner checkTactile gear+commit reveal, ~3-4 min racesTension collapse without simultaneous reveal
OrléansEasy7.86Bag draw → place on action recipe → bag growsBag-rummage animation + "the right tile finally showed up" beat18-round arc compression to 8-10
Tzolk'inMedium7.68Rotating gear timer; longer wait = stronger actionThe gears literally animate themselves — visual identity is freeSolo Pakal automa is "dramatically flat"
Tigris & EuphratesMedium7.51Lowest-of-N color scoring; tile placement + leader conflictsSingular mechanic with no mobile equivalent at allAI quality (Codito's delisted app is benchmark)
Great Western TrailMedium7.98Move-as-action-selection + deck-thinning for deliveryMaracaibo Digital proved Pfister ports work; clear UX templateMulti-track scoring teach-load

What's distinctive about each translation problem

Heat is commit-tension preservation. Lose simultaneous reveal → invent opponent-first gear telegraphing. The mechanic is mobile-native; the multiplayer feel is what's hard to recover.

Orléans is managed disappointment. In multiplayer, bad bag draws are absorbed by rivalry; solo, they just sting. Mitigation: soft-pity weighting + relics that reshape draws. The risk is making it too forgiving and losing the puzzle.

Tzolk'in is blocking-as-design. The rotating gear is gorgeous and translates instantly, but the competition for gear slots is what makes the calculus hard. Without it, the timing trade-off becomes a puzzle without an opponent. Tribes & Prophecies expansion is a free roguelite content layer (13 tribes + 13 prophecies).

Tigris & Euphrates is singular-mechanic preservation. The lowest-of-N scoring exists almost nowhere in digital. The challenge is teaching it (it's notoriously hard to grok) and building AI that opens war meaningfully. The 2011-2020 Codito app proved a port could work; its delisting created an under-served audience.

Great Western Trail is multi-track legibility. The deck-thinning + delivery + parallel tracks is mobile-native, but Pfister games are famously hard to teach. Recommended a gated tutorial Season unlocking one track at a time — heretical to fans, probably essential.

Cross-cutting patterns

  1. Every Tier-1A candidate has no other digital game with the same core loop. This isn't a coincidence — the BGG-elite tier is dominated by heavy Eurogames whose mechanics are too complex/long for direct mobile clones, but whose primitives (bag-build, gear-rotation, lowest-of-N, multi-track) are exactly the kinds of things a clever roguelite could compress.
  2. The "digital twist" is almost always the same recipe: replace multiplayer pressure with (a) AI personalities to simulate rivalry, (b) roguelite runs for short-session pacing, (c) meta-progression to soften loss. The variation is in which constraint replaces multiplayer blocking.
  3. None of the 5 require a license. Tigris is Knizia + previously licensed (Codito), but the mechanic (lowest-of-N scoring) isn't IP. The others are equally clear — you'd build "a roguelite bag-builder" not "Orléans Mobile."
  4. Heat and Orléans are the only two Easy-difficulty Tier-1A candidates. They are the natural v1 picks. The Mediums need more design risk-taking but offer correspondingly bigger upside (especially Tigris's singular mechanic).
  5. The deep-dives consistently flagged the same validation order: (1) play the tabletop solo for 5-10 sessions, (2) paper-prototype the digital twist with index cards, (3) greybox one core round before any meta-layer. This is the right framework.

Recommended next moves

If you're picking ONE to build:

  • Heat — best balance of unclaimed, Easy, and a genre slot (mobile racing deckbuilder) that's empty. Lowest invention cost; the Hollywood-movie aesthetic gives strong art direction.
  • Orléans — nearly tied. Bag-builder roguelite is a vacant genre on mobile and the asymmetric Patrons + relic system is straightforward to design.
  • Tigris & Euphrates — highest upside (most singular mechanic) but highest risk (hardest to teach, AI is the boss problem). Pick this if you want to make a genuinely novel game vs. a mobile-friendly classic.

If you're picking TWO to build (build cheap prototypes for each):

  • Heat + Orléans. Fastest path to playable. Both Easy. Both have proven sub-genres (deckbuilder, roguelite). Different enough that they don't compete.
  • Heat + Tzolk'in. Both have visually-strong "killer features" (gear shift, rotating gears). Both have "compress simultaneous-multiplayer-tension" as the core problem. Could share UI patterns.

Before any code, validate by:

  • Buying or borrowing the physical games and playing solo (Heat with Legends, Orléans with the Invasion solo scenarios, Tzolk'in with Pakal, T&E with Knizia's solo variant, GWT with the Solitaire mode)
  • Writing a paper prototype of just the digital twist (e.g., for Heat, the opponent-first gear telegraphing rule with index cards)
  • Greyboxing one round in your engine of choice before designing any meta-layer

If you want to broaden the analysis (the scrape just expanded to top 10,000):

  • Re-run LLM extraction on the next 100-500 games beyond the top 100 (still cheap via your Claude Code quota — 25-125 agents over a few hours wall time). The BGG top-100 is biased toward heavy Eurogames; getting into the 500-2,000 rank range will surface lighter, more mobile-native games that might be even better fits than what we've found.

Appendix: full deep-dive briefs