Est-il légalement possible de faire un clone du jeu?

Avec les jeux de société comme "Monopoly", "Domino", "Checkers" ou "Echecs", les développeurs de jeux peuvent-ils créer des clones et les vendre? De plus, puis-je créer un clone de jeux ZX Spectrum? Y a-t-il beaucoup de parties du jeu avec lesquelles on peut faire la même chose?

Lawyer here for a change. You can copy all of gameplay without any issues at all. That is not copyrightable or enforceable. The things that matter are assets - art, sound, music, video, etc. For example if you take ZX game and clone it with your own assets you will be perfectly fine doing that. But if you take some asset and use it in different kind of game all together, it could be enforceable. There are loads of examples of this in the industry, for example first Warcraft basically copied Dune 2 gameplay mechanics and the genre was totally new at the time. For a more recent example - check out Gameloft company, the developer for iphone. What they do is copy successful game ideas as close as possible to the original but without using any art assets from originals. That is their successful business model. They copied games like Halo, Starcraft, World of warcraft and so on with huge success in their field. It is even funny that if you check their wow clone you may see that animations of orcs and their looks are very close to the original.

TL;DR version: As long as you copy gameplay and don't copy any assets (art, music, animation) you are 100% fine.

I am not a lawyer.

You've got two separate sets of games.

Chess, checkers, dominoes, etc. are very old - literally thousands of years. They obviously have no copyrights. You can make a chess game and sell it with no problems.

ZX Spectrum games and Monopoly are copyrighted/patented; that is, the game belongs to someone. You would need to seek out the copyright holders (that is, the creator of the ZX Spectrum games or Hasbro, who own Monopoly) to make a version.

You could, however, make a game where you have to buy property and build on them. You could not use Monopoly's names, places, or rules, but something very similar.

I might also add that if you are sued and you do not have the resources (money, time) to defend yourself, it is 100% irrelevant whether you would win or not.

When I consider the legal ramifications of something, I often ask myself "what is the likelihood that I will get sued if I do this?" as opposed to "if I were sued because of this, would I win?"

Not a lawyer and you should check with one for assurance.

There should not a problem as long as you don't copy any specific names, things or text since you cannot trademark or copyright gameplay & rules.

This will obviously vary a lot from country to country, but the basic idea is that you can't make an exact clone, but you can make a knock-off version. Board games tend to be covered by two aspects: the copyright on the written rules of the game, the trademarks and copyrights on the visual elements to the game.

The underlying mechanics and gameplay tend not to be covered by any legal protection. However, and this is a damn big however, as certain countries (like the US) offer software patents it seems possible that a company could indeed patent the gameplay itself. However, for popular games the mechanics are usually so common as not likely to be granted such protection.

Mostly however companies protect their brand. If your game does not infringe on their brand you are probably safe. Be careful about copying rules (this also applies to video games) too closely. If you have a game that behaves nearly identical to another but with distinct artwork I think most people would consider it a derivative work, and thus infringing on the original.

So, feel free to replicate a basic gameplay mechanic, but never duplicate graphics and avoid duplicating level-structure.

Dominoes, checkers, and chess are all ancient games that you can do whatever you want with. Modern games like Monopoly are trickier and the legalities can vary. First off, never copy the names because that is copyrighted. Similarly, change all the graphics because images are protected.

It's usually fine to copy gameplay because that can't be copyrighted, but watch out for patents on hit games. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if the rules of Monopoly are patented.