High-Level Project Summary
As a new era of space exploration is upon us, we of eXplore, designed the new board game on space exploration. The game helps us understand space exploration's dynamics, difficulties, and dangers with an educational tool.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Summary:
Created by a group of 5 friends, eXplore is the brand new board game on space exploration.
We asked ourselves how to get people of all ages to play with something that's competitive, enjoyable, and educative. We choose a board game as it's the perfect family game, and we want to entice the next generation of young people to space exploration.
How The Game works:
Setting: Our game is set in a not far long future, where NASA has proposed a competition around the solar system, in which the main objective is the exploration of the entire solar system. The game itself can be seen as a mixture of exploration and agriculture, but with an educational background.
Players: 2-4
Objective: They are personal and to be written.
Boards: There are two types of boards.
The main one is where the game develops. In this, we can find our solar system, the field of competition! The board is circular with ten orbits, where eight are movable, corresponding for each planet, while two are asteroids belt. The main feature of the board is the movement of each planet along its orbit. (The calculations of when each planet's orbit should be turned are provided in the game guide).
The second, instead, is a personal board divided into six sections relatives to the mechanics of the game.
The first is about one's character, with personal health and that of the spaceship, while in the other 5, we can find the mechanics of the game, and here we can find:
- Oxygen, useful for planting or surviving.
- Fuel, essential for moving.
- Plantations, to colonize new planets and/or produce oxygen.
- Metals, useful for repairs and construction.
- Water, as we all have to drink water to survive.
Characters: Each player has a character with different abilities; the characters are:
- Mechanical [Has increased metal storage and increased metal production].
- Pilot [The pilot has a longer spacecraft life and is immune to unexpected movement].
- Doctor [Immune to unforeseen illnesses, has a longer life].
- Scientist [Increased production of oxygen, plantation, and water].
Game: Each player has the possibility in each turn to perform two actions, which can be moved, as landing/take-off or farming.
Movement: To move, you need to use a fuel reserve (1 fuel=2 square). To move through the asteroids, you have to use a complete turn and two fuel units, given the difficulty of travel (The pilot does not suffer from this condition).
Each turn involves the use of one unit of water.
Landing / Take-off: To land or take off on a planet, you need to use an entire turn with higher consumption of gasoline and oxygen.
Each turn on a planet involves the use of two units of water and two units of oxygen.
Farming: On a planet, there is the possibility of increasing the production of oxygen and plantations and creating buildings using the resources that each possesses.
For example: To increase your water production, you have to build a factory using a lot of metal, oxygen, and water.
Cards: There are three types of cards:
- Supplies: This card can add units to your reserves of water, oxygen, metals, etc...
- Opportunity: Cards that mainly bring advantages or allow exchanges.
- Quirk: Cards that may or may not give benefits.
Space Agency Data
The whole observation and starting ideas were all based on this site. We thought that creating a game about exploring our solar system could teach many exciting and fascinating aspects of our lives in this small part of the universe.
Hackathon Journey
Thats' the 3rd time that we have taken part in this competition, and our group, although it is now solid, during the Hackathon Days, it's always full of conflicting ideas and different theories, after all, that's the main point of the competition, trying to make the best out of everyone else to create something that can be useful for the next generation of space explorers.
References
Tags
#Space #Exploration #NASA #eXplore
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.