New E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial board game breaks the franchise’s bizarre curse

polygon.com:

In nearly every capacity, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial remains an unqualified success. The sentimental sci-fi sensation charmed audiences back in 1982, breaking box-office records and laying the foundation for generations of suburban fantasia (hello, Stranger Things). Yet its charms have almost never translated into gaming experiences. A hastily made Atari 2600 cartridge helped send the entire market into free fall and took the idea of burying failure to shocking extremes. Can a board game break that bizarre curse?

Funko’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Light Years from Homeis flying in to challenge that paradigm. The eye-catching co-op board game designed by its Prospero Hall team (who’ve crafted tabletop adaptations of Spielberg’s Jaws and Jurassic Park) is unusually similar to seeing the film for the first time as a child; if you can get past some early moments of unrest, you’re in for a treat.

Designed for two to four players, Light Years from Home takes the film’s plot — get E.T. to “phone home” — to complicated but exciting extremes. Each bike-riding player — Elliott, his siblings, Michael and Gertie, and semi-obscure friend Greg — moves themselves or the alien around the board, collecting communicator pieces and evading pesky federal agents (who possess neither guns nor walkie-talkies). Those communicator pieces are used to build a set of dice to help the beautifully designed mothership piece move — but only once the players carry the dice (and E.T.) in their bike baskets to a special spot in the forest to send their signal.

The customization aspects make E.T. as spirited as the Dungeons & Dragons game the kids play early on in the film. Each character has unique abilities, and carrying the little