Making It Your Own

Not interested in snakes? Fine. Substitute your own mindless predator. Favorites include:

• Bees
• Piranhas
• Spiders
• Zombies
• Sharks
• Aliens

You can also use any setting you can imagine. The only hard requirements of the setting are the two from The Design Spine:

1. The characters cannot leave until certain conditions are met. These conditions must be either beyond their control (by default, the passage of time) or complicated to ensure (several steps required).
2. The antagonist creatures can move freely throughout the setting. They should be able to emerge in unexpected ways at unpredictable times. One should never feel safe from the snakes.

The reskin checklist

Swapping snakes for spiders takes about thirty minutes and changes none of the rules. Walk the whole project through:

• The predator. What is it, and where does it come from? The attack table stays — a "snake attack" becomes whatever your creature does. A zombie bite is a point of Guts lost as you shove it off. A bee swarm in your hair is a point of Cool. The table is the table.
• The tube. The plane was a container. Your new container needs the same logic: sealed, moving, or otherwise inescapable. A cruise ship, a night train, a subway car, a high-rise under quarantine, a wedding where the doors are locked.
• The exception. Why can't they leave? The snowstorm and the bitten pilot are plane answers. Your setting needs its own: the train doesn't stop until the next station; the ship's bridge is swarmed; the doors only open from the outside.
• The clock. Keep it. The countdown is what makes it a game instead of a crawl. Reskin it however you like — hours until landing, hours until the tide, hours until the doors open.
• The Stories. Rewrite the passenger stories for the new container. The pitch, the witness, the honeymoon — they all still work on a train.

What never changes

The five traits. The 25 points. The one-sentence Story. The attack table. The clock. If you change those, you're not reskinning, you're writing a new game — which is fine, but it won't be Snakes on a Plane anymore, and you'll have to fix the balance yourself. The design spine is what makes every reskin work. Keep the spine, swap the skin.