Disclaimer - I don't own Jumanji, but I thought I'd write this story to tell Jumanji's point of view.
Enjoy.
It's Time.
The game of Jumanji knew it was almost time to feed. For decades it had been wandering the world, floating on the surface of the sea, avoided by the ocean life who sensed the games' malevolent aura; unlike humans, the animals of the world were far from stupid, but the game of Jumanji knew how important humans were with its existence.
The game had been drifting around for years, using its energy to nourish itself while ignoring the storms and the waves that cropped up continually. It didn't have the same piffling concerns humans travelling the seas had, the concerns of food and water. In the beginning, it was fully nourished when the boy known as Alan Parrish and the girl Sarah Whittle had thrown it into the river weighted down by bricks.
It never failed to amuse Jumanji with the futile attempts by its former players to ensure it never passed on to others, but Jumanji was a magical game. Its strong magic allowed it to survive in environments where other games simply would not survive, and besides that time was the key to its longevity.
Time was Jumanji's greatest ally.
The game knew it was only a matter of time before it was either caught up in a fisherman's net, or it was washed up on a beach in some part of the world, but even if it was washed up the intelligence of the game genuinely did not care where it ended up. Hopefully, it would arrive in a place where there would be more children it could influence to pass around instead of just simply allowing them to throw it away somewhere where it would disappear for long periods before resurfacing somewhere else.
But unfortunately, the game was unable to do that.
As the game of Jumanji drifted in the sea, the intelligence within began to think.
It did not know who had created it, it didn't even know where it had originated from. All it knew was that it had been created a long time ago, but while the game was able to grow using the different generations of children who used it since it read the minds of the children who entered or played it so it was able to adjust to the different points in history it was played in, though it would never precisely know where and when it had been created, though for all the game knew it had always existed, and it had been conceived magically somehow in the same way that a baby could be conceived within the mother's womb.
But it had the capacity to evolve, to change and to grow in ways that were similar to animals or human beings, though many things remained consistent.
The wooden box which was floating in the sea was essentially a portal into another world, a world of humid jungles and dangerous creatures where nature had been warped and twisted until it was a blend of part nature, part fantasy, part stereotype of old views of jungles and of animal life you'd find in places like India, Africa, and South America, and it was all mixed together until you had a savage land trapped inside this world where everything was prepared to kill.
When you played the game of Jumanji, it was an absolute certainty one player, or maybe two, depending on who was playing the game at the time, would be brought through the portal where they would be forced to survive. Their presence alone would draw in the unique magic that children possessed, and lost, over their lives which was why adults were never targeted. At the same time, the game would also have an open doorway where the magic of the Earth was drawn in to allow the game to feast for years and years.
Jumanji needed children to be brought inside itself, and it usually happened in the first stages of the new feeding cycle after finding the players whom the game felt would feed it the most. Once it had found the minds, it would sound the drums, which would compel the children to find the game and begin to play it.
Once it had them caught within its spell, like flies becoming stuck in the web, it would unleash its spider and it would look for a moment to bring one or even more children into the game, and then it would go dormant for a time while it waited for new children to feast on.
During that time, if one of the children was sucked through the portal, the game would create a small alternate timeline in order to create the portal and expand it to purify the magical energy it would absorb
However, the more players who found the game initially, the more magic the game absorbed because the portal would be much much larger.
Sometimes a single game of Jumanji would last for decades - the longest the game had been played was when it had been brought to London where three children had been brought into the game to play it, and it had been played for three centuries. Time had little meaning inside its world, so the players did not age. In that time the portal to the human world remained open, so the magic the game had absorbed during that particular round had been incredible.
The sheer amount of nutritional magic the game had soaked up to feast on had been tremendous, so great in fact the game had grown much larger on the outside though the game was more than capable of changing its very nature as long as the rules it used to justify its existence remained constant, allowing for several more players to come and play it to widen the portal as the game sucked the two new players inside to join the original two.
But truthfully Jumanji knew it wouldn't always receive more than four or five players at a time, and it was realistic enough to know that although a century's worth of magic would certainly allow it to feed for longer periods, it would not happen all the time just like it couldn't guarantee to find just the right kind of minds needed to play it. Sometimes it would take years for the game to find the next generation, but it would find them.
Jumanji needed to feed and as it drifted, it put its full trust in time and waited to be washed up somewhere or caught and taken somewhere where there were children waiting for it.
But the game of Jumanji was not worried. It could go without years without feeding.