In high school I made a Plants VS Zombies Board Game!
In early high school I attempted to make my own Plants VS Zombies board game, and it was a little chaotic and convoluted.
To represent the zombies I used cheap wind-up toys and attached printed pictures of the zombies onto them with sticky tack. While the plants were made of Legos, magnets and a few other random items, once again with printed pictures of the plants attached to them. Basically the goal was to defeat all of the zombies before they reach your house on the other end of the lawn, just like the game. However my board game version required a lot of faced-paced hands-on action, as one player had to manually wind up and place each of the zombies one by one very quickly (I was usually the one operating the zombies, cause I had quick hands), and the other player had to manually operate all of the individual plants simultaneously, so I recommended having more than 1 player operate the plants together, like a co-op mode. NGL it was a bit of a mess. I don't fully remember all of the details of how I made the game, but here's what I do remember.
To represent the Sunflower I actually used a miniature slot machine gumball dispenser toy (filled with only yellow gumballs to represent the suns), and the player had to pull the lever to make the 3 reels spin and spit out a gumball/sun (NGL it felt more like the PVZ Slot Machine minigame than a natural Sunflower), which act as the currency you need to buy the plants, and different plants require specific amounts of sun/gumballs before placing them on the board. NGL I think I tried a little too hard to make it as accurate to the game as I could, and in doing so I ended up just adding another tedious extra step on top of everything.
Anyway, despite PVZ having so many plants, I only recreated about 10 of them for my board game adaptation (plus 1 original plant I made up just for the game), including the following.
The Peashooters were Lego cannons, like the ones you find in those Lego Pirate sets. Being the most basic starter plant, they cost only 1 sun/gumball. Honestly nobody who played ever really picked the Lego cannon Peashooters, probably because they were so weak and the tiny Lego pebbles they shoot out hardly do anything to the wind-up zombies, just made them wobble a little bit at best. NGL I didn't think that through very well at all.
I think the most popular plant most of my friends chose was the Cob Cannon, which cost the most sun (4 gumballs to be exact) but was very OP. It was basically one of those Lego projectile launchers (like the kind that go with Lego submarine sets that function as torpedo launchers), and it one-shots almost every zombie instantly! Its firepower is also why I made it the most expensive plant.
The Spikeweed was simply a flat piece of Lego that sits on the ground, and when a wind-up zombie steps on it their walking pattern gets ruined by its bumpy texture/pattern and falls over. It cost 2 suns, but I also included an option to upgrade the Spikeweed to a Spikerock for 1 additional sun, in which the player attaches another piece of flat Lego on top of it which had tiny circular pieces attached on top in a Chessboard like pattern, to ensure no zombie could survive walking on it and they're guaranteed to fall over.
The Squash was arguably my laziest plant design/method, as it was just a small heavy block that the player drops on top of any single zombie of their choice. I also made it cost 4 suns (just like the Cob Cannon) as a means of discouraging players from just spamming it over and over, since that's not how the game was meant to be played.
Now here's where things get interesting. The Magnet Shroom is basically an actual magnet that's attached to the ground, waiting for a metallic zombie to walk into it and gets stuck to it. (Cost 1 sun.) For context, some of the wind-up zombies (like Bucketheads and Screen Door shields) have a small thin piece of metal attached to them, and they get instantly defeated if a magnet gets attached to it.
Wall Nuts were basically tall wall-like pieces of Lego that attach to the ground and stop wind-up zombies in their path. (Cost 2 suns.) Their only design flaw that I overlooked was that they're not ideal to place behind Peashooters or Cob Cannons because they block their aim, so they're better to be placed in front of the catapult plants. Speaking of which...
The Cabbage Pult was simple catapult made of Lego with a rounded basket part on the end (cost 3 suns), and the cabbages it launched were actually small magnet stones, which were ideal for taking down metallic zombies.
The Kernel Pult was the same idea as the Cabbage Pult, except it had more of a bowl on the end, and it launched a very tiny magnet stone (which was much more lightweight and launched higher than the Cabbage Pult's magnet projectiles) alongside a piece of Lego. Basically the magnet was the butter and the Lego piece was the kernel. (Cost 3 suns.)
The Melon Pult was one of the 2 most powerful plants in the game next to the Cob Cannon, except its projectiles are launched in an arc. Once again it's a simple Lego catapult like the other 2 Pults, except this one doesn't use magnets. Instead it had a more rectangular crate shaped part on the end, which was just big enough to fit a 9V Battery (standing up) inside it, which was the projectile it launched in place of watermelons. The melon batteries were big and heavy, guaranteed to give a concussion to any zombie it hits on the head. (Cost 4 suns)
The final plant was sort of an original one I made up specifically for the board game, I called it a "Rootator" (rotating root). As the name implies, it allows an individual plant to rotate left and right and aim at any zombie in any lane (very similarly to the Heavy Weapon minigame), rather than just being fixed in a forward facing position. It cost 3 suns, and it's basically a flat rotating Lego piece that the player attaches any of the Lego-made plans onto so it can rotate. As expected, it was a fairly popular choice for most who played it as well.
As for the zombies, like I said earlier they were mostly just wind-up toys, with a few of them having small thin pieces of metal attached to them as a weakness for the magnetic plants to exploit. However 1 of them (the Screen Door Zombie) I attached a little stand on the back to stop the wind-up toy from falling over backwards, so it was a little harder to defeat than the others zombies. NTM depending on the distance between the plants & zombies and where I place them, sometimes I'd need to rewind up some of the zombies if they stop in their tracks before they could get close to the other end of the board, so there were some annoying pauses here and there.
I also added in a couple boss battles, specifically the Gargantuar and Dr. Zomboss. To represent the Gargantuar I actually used one of those old Roboraptor toys, specifically the smaller one that just walks forward constantly. Needless to say it was a lot harder to take down than the cheap wind-up toys, and I remember my friends losing to it the first few times. But with some trial and error they managed to defeat the Gargantuar with a good strategy, mainly involving Spikerocks, Cob Cannons and Melon Pults (as far as I remember)
As I previously mentioned, the final boss is Dr. Zomboss, who was represented by a BIG Roboraptor! Unlike the Mini Roboraptor I used to represent the Gargantuar, the big one couldn't be knocked over by the puny plants, so I actually made 2 different ways to defeat him. I attached 5 small metal pieces to the Roboraptor's arms, legs and nose, and if the player manages to land a magnet projectile on all 5 of those weak points, they win! However the second way to defeat him is by taking out Dr. Zomboss himself, represented by a thin piece of Lego attached on the top of the Roboraptor's head (with a printed picture of Zomboss on it of course), and if the player manages to successfully knock Zomboss off the giant robot with a Pult projectile, they win! But of course doing that is easier said than done, given that it's a pretty high up shot, it was somewhat firmly attached so it doesn't get knocked off easily, and NTM the Roboraptor's head often moves around which makes aiming precisely at Zomboss more difficult. On paper it may sound impossible to do either of those things in time before the giant robot dinosaur reaches the house, but the good news is the big Roboraptor doesn't constantly walk forward like the Mini Roboraptor does, instead it mostly just roars and acts intimidating, and occasionally walks a few steps forward randomly, so the players got a little more wiggle room to put up a fight before Zomboss gets too close.
There are probably some little details I forgot about since it was quite a while ago, but that's pretty much how my Plants VS Zombies board game worked. Overall it was a fairly ambitious project that I was very proud of, even though it was a bit of a convoluted mess and not quite as perfected as I wanted it to be. While not everyone in my class was interested, some of my friends who gave it a try did have fun playing it for the most part.
