'Titanic' Board Games Are Weird As Hell

Because the art of cinema is apparently just a long-con designed to sell useless merchandise, we’ve naturally gotten some weird movie-based board games over the years -- like the Roger Rabbit cartoon genocide game or the Nightmare on Elm Street game which is basically Clue but where one of your friends is secretly a knife-handed child murderer. Despite the fact that James Cameron’s 1997 movie/bladder endurance test Titanic is mostly about a harrowing real-life tragedy, apparently, it too spawned a tabletop game which … is pretty weird.

The game takes place during the sinking portion of the movie, with players working to get passengers into lifeboats. You can play as either Jack, Rose, the Captain, or Cal -- yeah, that rich piece of crap who spends the third act literally trying to gun down his girlfriend. We’d rather play “Propellor Guy” than that jerk. Or a “James Cameron” character that allows one person to relentlessly scream at the other players.

If the idea of taking a real-life disaster that claimed the lives of more than 1500 souls and turning it into a product that occupies the same store shelf as Boggle and Doggie Doo seems strange to you, we regret to inform you that this wasn’t even the first Titanic game. There are multiple others, including 1975’s The Sinking of the Titanic, all about surviving the shipwreck and obtaining “food and water by visiting islands” -- which isn’t actually how anyone survived the Titanic.

Weirder still is the ‘80s game Raise the Titanic, in which players seek to “earn fame and fortune” by looting the sunken ship, like Monopoly but with more corpses.

At least the recent game has a tangential connection to a popular movie -- although if you want the full Titanic experience, we recommend covertly spiking your game night snacks with horse tranquilizer.

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Top Image: Paramount Pictures