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Adapting existing games to music is not rare. It happens in educational and artistic contexts, with sound-making or with just theory. The more popular the game, the more frequently it gets its musical version, but there are also other important factors for that, like simplicity, or the in-game usage of sound-space that influence the adaptability.
Pros: Familiarity of players. High-quality components available without DIY. Using tried and true solutions.
Cons: Less interesting for a subset of players. Lost opportunity for additional creative engagement. Popular ≠ good.
To the last point, indeed, there are games that are very popular not because they're good, but because they've been around for a long time and/or due to intense marketing. Now, let's see the frequently occurring options for adaptations.
Roll-and-move games
A simple mechanic of "roll dice — move that many spots — do what it says where you land" is probably the most popular for musical adaptation. Even here at the wiki, we have a Goose game with cues from all around the site.
Chess
We will have a specific page for all matters of chess music and musical chess. But let's note that due to the game's complexity, adaptations are realized in a more advanced, artistically involved contexts, and it's not easy to do them in a broadly participatory way.
Go
A bit less internationally popular, but with much simpler rules than chess, Go has a few projects in software-assisted realm for generating music from games. If you know of the pieces that work with live performance, please, please, edit the links in.
Traditional playing cards
There are quite a few musical activities that are based on existing games with traditional playing cards, but probably there are more titles that use this prop in an originally musical way, without a connection to previous existing game. Currently on the wiki, there is one adaptation: CFSNAP!R148 (Snap! Rite) from 1969.
Adaptations on the wiki
| CFSNAP!R148 | an adaptation of a card game Snap |
| Goose | A classic dice game for musical interpertation |
Adaptations outside of the wiki
| Das Neunundneunzigmusikspiel | Lee-Sean Huang | free |
A goose roll-and-move game made of 99 carefully chosen musical prompts |
| Dixit | Jean-Louis Roubira | sold |
With many extensions this game is a huge set of inspire cards, rules allow musical play although by default it's for speaking |
| Musical Dominoes | C. W. Grimm | rare |
Classic Dominoes adapted to musical notes |
| Shake'n Play | rare |
Acoustic memory (Memo-like) game with 16 shakers of 8 distinct sounds to listen |
