Well this will be my first time posting here. Sort of stumbled upon the site while looking for information on board game design and what not.
My friend and I were thinking of making a Final Fantasy board game, at this point not really to market it and make money or anything, just more for our own enjoyment to play among friends and the like.
My question is, would I be breaking any big rules by making this game? I don't know if this is breaking copyrights if we're not selling it or distributing it, we'd probably only make one model of it and use that to play.
Second question is, in the event that we really like the idea and friends do, etc, how would you go about taking the idea to Square (makers of Final Fantasy)? Technically speaking FF is their property, so how would you approach a company about agame based on their property?
Copyright Question, etc.
should be ok, go ahead.
if it's really good, how to get it to SQUARE?
don't worry about it. I doubt that SQUARE gives a crap.
they would rather have Bandai make a crappy board game
for kids and market that than yours even though it
has better game play and an original unique idea.
For yourself, you can go all out, take anything and everything: rules, ideas, concepts, images. Do anything you want. It's called Fair-Use.
Don't think about distributing it though. Distributing it to a small number of people for no profits should be fine but you're entering a gray area if you start to distribute on the internet for example. Even if it's free.
If you want to go farther with your game. Sure, go ahead and contact Square. You never know. A good alternative would be to apply a new theme to your game and change the bits that could be infringing on Square's property.
Remember that if you make a parody of the concept, it is legal as long that you do not steal images and some other thing. You could rename your game to something else like "First Fantasy".
Well I wasn't planning to distribute it anyway. My friend and I were just going to make the game, work on it, play test it, then make a decent looking sort of prototype that we can play amongst friends and if it's really good we'll think about discussing it with Square. And if they don't like it, like you said, just change everything that in "Final Fantasy" and market it to someone else. It's going to be sort of RPG-ish, so a company like TSR or something like that. Thanks all for the advice :)