Have you ever wanted to bring the roadie-running, blind-firing, drone-chainsawing action of Gears of War to the breakfast table or living room floor? Epic and Fantasy Flight Games thought so, and soon you will be able to do just that with Gears of War: The Board Game. Family games night will never be the same again.

Designed by Corey Konieczka (credits include the Battlestar Galactica, Warrior Knights, and World of Warcraft board games, among others), the Gears of War board game promises to bring a faithful translation of all we love about the GoW videogames (up to four-player co-op, suppressing fire, cover, calling your COG allies names as you pick them up off the battlefield, and running away from berzerkers) to your tabletop. What perfect timing with excitement for Gears of War 3 at an all time high, just coming out of the beta and breaking pre-order records.

The game looks complete with 30 exquisitely detailed COG and locust figurines, and it comes with over 200 cards players will use to build a Hand of Order (your hand of actions) to move your marine around the map, take cover, and attack. It sounds like players will choose from one of seven scenarios – from placing sonic resonators deep underground to escaping a berzerker – and the maps will be randomly generated using tiles as the game progresses. With all of those options, and an average playtime of 1-3 hours, you are looking at dozens of hours of potential playtime that will be different each time you play.

On top of all of that, the game employs what Fantasy Flight Games is calling an intelligent game system that lends sets of tactics to specific enemy types, so drones will act like drones, boomers like boomers, and (unfortunately) berzerkers and theron guards will act like they should as well. The only thing that might be missing is an active reload mechanic, but that might have become cumbersome in an already turn-based system.

Cooperative board games are still relatively rare, but (and this may surprise some of you e-gamers out there) the board game industry is doing just fine. Games like Arkham Horror (Cthulhu, not Batman) and Shadows Over Camelot (where one player could be a traitor with different victory conditions than his erstwhile companions) pull friends together into the same room for some extremely fun times. They also tend to provide a murderously long setup time, but it's worth it.

Gears of War: The Board Game should be available soon, has a suggested age range of 13+, and it will cost $79.95 (which is pretty standard).

Interested? We are.

Sources: Fantasy Flight Games, Board Game Ratings