Portal board game coming from Cryptozoic, here's how it works

Portal is being adapted into a board game with the cooperation of Cryptozoic, and now we have a better idea of just how it will work.

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Last week, Valve and border game manufacturer Cryptozoic announced they would be working together on a board game based on the Portal series, but details were scant on just how the board game would work. Today we've gotten a clearer picture of the upcoming adaptation, as well as a surprising bit of info on who came up with the idea.

The "Portal: Uncooperative Cake Acquisition Game" (not the final title) puts you in charge of the Aperture Laboratories testing chamber. Two to four players will move expendable test subjects around the board to find the best test chambers, and players will be able to eliminate other test subjects or their own to achieve victory.

But while you might expect such a concept to come from the board game company, it was actually the brainchild of Valve. Polygon reports that an internal team was toying with the idea, with two or three people working on it at a time totaling a dozen over the course of building the prototype. They had been working on it for a year before approaching Cryptozoic.

"When presented with the opportunity to work with Valve, of course, we jumped at it," Cryptozoic president Cory Jones said. "They had a game that they had been putting together, and it was actually really good." He said that Valve's prototype was already a functioning game and they probably could have finished it up themselves, but his company was in charge of "sharpening up" the design.

The Portal board game is aimed at releasing in October, and the earlier announcement pegged the tentative price point around $50.

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