Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – RPG, Board, Card games

This text is intended to present the richnes of Ninja Turtles tabletop games, i.e. paper RPGs, board games. card games, etc. Only shortly present them, our goal is not to describe every possible game that came out, but to outline the topic.

While the first video game appeared only in 1989, five years after premiere of first comics, and 2 years after first animated tv series, other kinds of games did not wait that long. The first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness paper based RPG manual appeared as early as 1985, published by Palladium Books. It was a serious and more mature system, in the tone of the first comics, not the later animated series. As part of the “main world”, the last expansion (Turtles Go Hollywood) was released in 1990, there was also a separate series with an action set in the future, After the Bomb, although further expansion from this series were definitely less turtle, connection with the TMNT after some time became purely symbolic. Palladium had plans to release a new RPG in 1997, unsatisfactory pre-sales and too little interest, however, made them abandon the idea, thus they lost the license in 2000. No one else has tried to release classic RPGs after them.

Moving on to board games, there is also an amazing richnes here. They can be divided into two types, the first are all original games that do not adapt the proven formats. In a nutshell: a huge amount of games came out. From very simple board games, that the only interesting thing abous is fact, that they are TMNT-licensed, to those that can defend themselves by being solid products, and embedding them in a turtleverse is just a nice addition.

Interesting and relatively recent examples of such games is released by IDW Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shadows of the Past and its reboot/sequel, a whole series of main games and add-ons under the common name Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures! Other interesting games include Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Subterranean Sewer Hockey released in 1991, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Foot Clan Street Fight Game from 2014, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tower of Doom from 1990.

Of course, there were also various card games, such as Mutant Mayhem or Turtle Power, which were based on the series from 2012, and TCG based on the earlier series (in addition to the ones shown, the turtles had also a lot of various cards that were only collectable, without the aspect of playing them, so they do not fall under this text, we only mention them on the margin).

The second type are “licensed games”, ie combining some proven format with Ninja Turtles. Here, one should definitely mention, for example, Monopoly (which probably cooperated with every possible brand), which is distinguished by the fact that as many as four different editions were created! One is in the style of the first series, there are six painted figures as pawns, four turtles, Splinter and Casey Jones, there is also a tiny slice of pizza and a pizza box. The other two editions are based on the third series, from 2012. In one (metal, unpainted) figures are Kraang, Spike, a throwing star/shuriken, a piece of pizza, a container with mutagen and a Shredder helmet, in the other the figures are more typical, also metal and unpainted, but they show four turtles, Splinter and Shredder. All the rest of the game, the board, the cards’ appearance etc. are reworked and use the ninja turtles world.

There is also a turtle version of the “Guess Who?” Game. Another example of such a licensed game is Munchkin Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the name of which says it all. It is actually a less board game and more of a card game, and speaking of these, of course turtles have also been combined with games such as “Uno” or “regular” cards, which you can play any of the popular card games, from solitaire to poker.

There are also at least two turtle versions of the traditional Chinese game, version of Twister (called Pizza Spin), Memo and probably a lot of other things.