Beyond the board

As my dinner party guests lanced the plastic wrap on the new “Saturday Night Live” edition of Trivial Pursuit last week, they found a slew of cute gimmicks inside the box. Among them: sassy game pieces -- including a tiny plastic man who, like Chris Farley’s motivational speaker, lives in a van down by the river -- and a DVD.

Whenever guests landed on a “wedge,” their question would come not from a card but the DVD. Soon the TV was resurrecting long-retired Dan Aykroyd sketches, Steve Martin songs and Adam Sandler characters.

That was the good part. The bad: the unintended Land Sharks living inside the persnickety disc. One technical glitch kept causing the same questions to pop up over and over again.

Question 1: “What song is Steve Martin introducing in this audio clip?”

Answer: “King Tut.”

Question 2: “What song is Steve Martin introducing in this audio clip?”

Answer: “King Tut.”

Question 3? We’ll spare you the pain.

Is this the future of board games? Manufacturers such as Hasbro and Pressman Toys certainly hope so, albeit without the bugs. Increasingly, toy companies are pairing plastic tokens, laminated cards and other board-game staples with DVD-interactive features: movie scenes, puzzles, mouthy actors dressed as weird characters, clips from TV shows or commercials and timed challenges.

The game genres include TV trivia and whacked-out horror-comedy. And with some titles, such as the Trivial Pursuit games, partyers can even nix the board and the dice altogether and read the questions right off the screen, leaving people free to mingle.

At roughly 2 years old, the DVD board game is still too young to signal a shift in leisure culture. But nonetheless, some industry watchers say that DVDs are in our gaming future.

“People don’t want to sit around a table anymore,” argues Jim Silver, editor of the Toy Book trade magazine. “It just becomes cumbersome and stiff. This way you have the looseness of a party.

“That’s why I think this category is just beginning to grow.”

Though a handful of DVD board games certainly does not signal a raging trend, the number of them is on the rise, with at least 11 major titles expected in stores for the holidays.

Hasbro, owner of the Parker Brothers brand, has released not only the “SNL”-themed Trivial Pursuit but also a pop-culture DVD edition, with scenes from commercials, movies and other entertainment. Screenlife, the Seattle-based maker of the 2-year-old movie trivia game Scene It?, just released a TV-themed version in Circuit City stores, with wider distribution next month. The company plans to launch James Bond and Turner Classic Movie editions in time for end-of-year shopping.

Meanwhile, New York-based Pressman Toys is selling a comedy-horror board game called AtmosFear. The star attraction: an actor dressed as a zombie-like being called the Gatekeeper, who hurls insults at players via the TV screen. He also injects himself into the game every so often, “banishing” certain players into “black holes” or ordering others to jump ahead.

And gamers can expect to see still more DVD board games -- including SpongeBob SquarePants, Family Feud and Nick titles from Imagination Licensing -- in stores starting next month.

A hopeful toy industry says the DVD-cardboard game hybrid is a category set to explode. Screenlife says it expects to sell “millions of units” during the holiday season.

But the reaction among some partyers can be more lukewarm.

About 30 minutes into game play, the AtmosFear DVD mysteriously shut down. Maybe the Gatekeeper needed to touch up his face paint, or perhaps he ran out of insults. Either way, guests said they preferred the silence to the Gatekeeper’s prodigious yammering.

The game did have some pluses. The on-screen art has an almost video-game-like feel that could make it popular with children; at one point the Gatekeeper orders a player to pick up the remote and click on one of four doors that appear on the TV screen. Like the Chance cards in classic Monopoly, each door carries a different fate that must play itself out on the board.

But some die-hard gamers say they’d rather pass than play -- especially given that the Microsoft Xbox console offers a live version of Trivial Pursuit. The unit allows all the same video features, plus the ability to play with people who live miles away, via the Internet.

Avid weekend gamer Jonathan Zaleski, a 35-year-old public relations executive who lives in Manhattan Beach, says he uses his Xbox every weekend to play Trivial Pursuit against a pair of buddies in San Diego.

“With the Xbox, the board has moved completely to my screen,” he says. “Having a DVD with a board game, that just seems like a lot more work. And given what Xbox does, it just seems like a step backward to go to a DVD board game.”

Still, for people without an Xbox-sized budget, the DVD-cardboard hybrid may be the next best thing.

“It makes your game interactive without having to buy any new equipment,” says Craig Kinzer, chairman at Screenlife, maker of the Scene It? games. “And if people don’t want to play with a board, they don’t have to.”

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Games offering plugged-in play

The latest board games include DVDs along with the usual laminated cards and plastic game pieces. (All require a DVD player.) A look at five on the market now:

Scene It? ($49.99, Screenlife) Claiming to be the first board game to use a DVD, this trivia-fest flashes scenes from movies and then quizzes players on actors or other tidbits of information. The game includes blockbusters such as “Shrek” as well as more forgettable fare -- unless you count 1991’s “Soapdish” as a watershed film.

Scene It? TV Edition ($44.99, Screenlife) Like the movie version, the small-

screen edition has two kinds of categories, one for individual players, and an “all play” in which competitive types can shout each other down. The game features clips from the ‘60s (“I Dream of Jeannie”) through today (“24”).

AtmosFear ($34.99, Pressman) A schlocky, colorful, horror-themed game aimed at teens and young adults. The DVD plays a crucial role, acting as a timer and forcing players to interact with the ghoulish host. It’s also the most complicated game of the lot,

with a slew of rules to memorize and bunches of small game

pieces to arrange before play

can begin.

Trivial Pursuit SNL Edition ($44.99, Parker Brothers) A buggy DVD notwithstanding, the game has a lot to offer fans of “SNL,” especially those who miss the original cast. This game uses the high-tech stuff mostly on “wedge” questions. Added element: If you can’t answer the question in time, the DVD flashes an “all play” signal that allows others to guess the answer and steal the wedge.

Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture Edition ($39.99, Parker Brothers) Arranged just like the “Saturday Night Live” edition, only focusing on a broader array of pop culture, including infomercials and fads such as mopeds. (Typical DVD question: a clip of a commercial for a Ron Popeil-designed sausage maker, followed by a question about the name of Popeil’s company.)