High-Level Project Summary
We chose to hack Space Quest: The Game! We’re here to prove that board games are a great format for teaching, while having fun. Our game is called Otherworldly Explorers. The goal of this game is to increase public interest in space science by performing outreach and completing missions. We designed it to be easy to pick up and quick to play. Players prepare for missions on Earth, then travel to the destination side of the board. Here we’ve demoed Jupiter and its 4 Galilean moons. All of our cards have details and fun facts sourced mostly from NASA websites and datasets. We’ve even included lots of information about past and future missions, as well as space technologies. Happy gaming!
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Hi! We’re Claudia and Lynn of the Penguins of Callisto. We chose to hack Space Quest: The Game. We’re here to prove that board games are a great format for teaching, while having fun. Gen Con is the largest board game convention in North America and been running annually since 1967. In 2019 there were 70,000 attendees and 538 exhibitors! Board gaming has expanded beyond a hobby, it now reaches deeper into other realms, like the classroom.
In this game you are a company and your goal is to create positive public perception by successfully launching and completing science mission. We decided that we wanted to impact a broad audience, our goal being middle schoolers or older, with a small time investment. The game should take about 10 minutes to learn and 45 minutes to play. We believe not only is a fun way to learn about what it takes to explore space and perform research, but will also will teach important life skill such as problem solving, communication skills and the importance of failures. Enjoy!
Our game is called Otherworldly Explorers. The goal of the game is to increase public interest in space science by performing outreach and completing missions. We’re designing it to be easy to pick up and quick to play. A game should take about 45 minutes. Players prepare for missions at different locations on Earth. These locations include Mission Headquarters, the Research Center, Media and Communications, and Engineering, which is where Launch Pad is located. When a rocket is ready, it travels through space and encounters some space event. Afterwards, the rocket is on the destination side of the board. Here we’ve demoed the Jupiter and its 4 Galilean moons. All of our cards have details and fun facts sourced mostly from NASA websites and datasets. We’ve included lots of information about real-life missions of the past, present, and future. Our Research Item cards give emphasis to the kinds of tools required to study different aspects of space science. Our Media cards showcase the many ways you can communicate science to the public.
Our game has been designed to be easily picked up and played. Most of the text is not necessary for gameplay, so if you just want to sit and play, you can. However, we highly recommend engaging with the game more because the text adds a lot of cool background information and depth to the game. For example, you may have a mission that involves a mass spectrometer, and the text about how it works, in what cases it can be used, and what data it provides, could make you want to learn more about the instrument. The game will have multiple destinations, each with many mission cards, so it is highly replayable. Expansions can be added with even more destinations, missions, technologies, corporations, events, and media outreach cards. New gameplay mechanisms can be added through expansions as well.
At this point, we have digital demo versions of all card types, and the Jupiter destination components. We also have draft physical versions of these items, that aren't as detailed, but allow us to move the pieces around as a player would. These physical drafts are mostly paper and board game components from other games.
We want people to sit down together and have fun while learning amazing things about the world and universe around us. We hope that every player gets excited about the space research going on around the world, because they can definitely get involved themselves! Check out our Github Wiki.
Check out our 30 second demo video here!
Space Agency Data
Datasets used so far
This game uses multiple images and incorporates many real facts about the components used to educate the public. Much of this information was found on NASA websites. Additionally, we browsed multiple datasets on the open.nasa.data page to see what research was being done at our destinations to inform the missions that players complete in order to win the game. . Here are some examples of the data sets we used to inspire our project!
Research Card: The Drill
We have mission cards that involve drilling for ice samples and measuring the thickness of the ice. The SLUSH dataset hopes to get samples from Eurpoa using a hot-point electro-mechanical drill that cuts through ice using rotary-percussive action, and melts chips with its hot bit to form slush. We added a drill (and information about ice drilling) to the Research Item deck, and it is required in order to complete one of Europa's missions.
Research Card: The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
The RISE-UP project is using the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica to test a Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for long-range exploration that could be flown in the future to Europa or another icy satellite. We also incorporated this as one of the Research Station items to pick up before completing another of Europa's missions.
Research Card: The Mass Spectrometer
The Europan Molecular Indicators of Life Investigation proposes to create a Europa-specific implementation of the Linear Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer (LITMS) to search for signs of life on Europa. We created a Mass Spectrometer Research Item. This item is required to complete a portion of the planetary protection mission that looks for chemical and molecular evidence of life.
Research Card: LIDAR
The Clementine LIDAR Data contains laser ranging data from the Clementine Mission to the Moon. This dataset was used to derive the Clementine Topography data set. This data was used to help track Clementine's orbit around the moon, as well as to create models that revealed the shape and internal structure of the moon. LIDAR is one of our Research Items cards. This item will be required to complete one of the Europa missions, and eventually also used for other topographic/geologic missions.
- https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/clementine/lidar.html
- https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/clementine/gravtopo.html
Destination: Jupiter
The Jupiter destination focuses on exploring Callisto, Io, Europa, and Ganymede. Each moon is featured on a card with fun facts surrounding it. On the back of the card, you can find details about which missions have explored the moon and more information about the interesting aspects of the specific moon. The Jupiter tile has an image of Jupiter on the front and fun facts surrounding detailed information about Jupiter on the back. All details on the backs of the cards and tiles relate to the Mission cards for those locations.
We used NASA's Solar System dataset to fill out the information for this destination. Pictures were also taken from that dataset or the related press releases on the Ring-Moon Systems Node of NASA's Planetary Data System.
- https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/jupiter-moons
- https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/joviansatfact.html
- https://pds-rings.seti.org/
Datasets for the future
As we were exploring data sets, we found some that would be useful as we continue to develop the game.
Io volcanoes
Searching for life on Mars, Search for Extra-Terrestrial Genomes
Hackathon Journey
Our hackthon journey started at a rugby game--at least that's we decided to team up off the field. We both love space and board games, so when we were looking through the different challenges and saw "Space Quest: The Game", we knew what we were doing the next weekend.
When the hackthathon started we knew we wanted our game to impact a wide audience (we decided on middle school and older), have a relatively small time investment (we estimate about 10 minutes to learn and 45 minutes to play), be highly educational (all our cards have real facts about technology, past or future missions, or space research), and most of all to be fun! We started by pulling out all of our board games for inspiration. These are a few that helped us out: Lift Off, Pandemic, Terraforming Mars, Horrified, Cytosis, and Ticket to Ride. It was quite a mess. We thought about what type of experience we wanted players to have. Should players compete or cooperate? Was it going to be a card game? A tile placing game? An adventure game? We decided on a mix of elements, with, of course, a focus on education. We chose to work on GitHub because we were both familiar with it and the Wiki gave us a lot of room to describe our game.
Next came the hard part, where in space did we want to explore? There were so many fun options we couldn't just pick just one! So we didn't; we decided that we would demo with one destination, Jupiter and its moons, but plan to create more space destinations and even consider expansion packs once the base game was finished. Check out our ideas for the future in the Wiki.
After deciding to have multiple destinations, we had to fit that into gameplay somehow. We didn't want to make a game simply about the difficulties of launching rockets, our focus was the research. We designed missions that were detailed and specific to the destination, as well as a few basic mission cards to play with all destinations. We decided to have an Earth actions phase, space events, and a Destination actions phase. We included resource cubes so the players had a reason to go to each location involved in planning, running, and completing a mission. We also wanted to emphasize science communication, so we include an alternate scoring system associated with outreach and education activities. Since we wanted multiple destinations, we had to make that area of the board generic to have space for the different components associated with each different destination. Now that we had an idea of what we wanted things to look like, we needed to start actually creating it all.
We started with paper, notecards and components stolen from our other board games to draft a physical board and move pieces around to determine the flow. Once we had worked out the set up, cards we needed, and other logistics, it was time to start designing the our different components. As you can see in our Wiki site and demo videos, we had many components to draft: the overall board, the Jupiter destination senario, Mission Cards, Space Event Cards, Research Items, Media Cards, and the Rule Book. After checking in with our local mentor on Saturday, we realized that we'd need to draft our components digitally. Having digital components allowed us to showcase the image data sets we were using, and made it easy to write up all the facts on our cards.
Drafting these components was exhausting but also fascinating! We learned so much reading about data sets from past missions and plans for future missions. We learned about how to drill for rock samples on Mars and ice samples on Europa. We learned about lidar--that was Lynn's favorite. Claudia's favorite was learning that tropical storm clouds can be miles high, when researching Jupiter's Great Red Spot. We learned about the Galieo missions, planetary protection, space trash and more! There was a lot to learn, synthesize and add to cards but we loved it! And that's all just the demo cards, there are tons more to make.
We had another check-in with our local mentor scheduled for 6pm Sunday, which helped us plan out the day. We decided to have our 30 second demo video prepared by that meeting to get feedback on it. We had no idea how hard it would be to explain 2 days of work in 30 seconds, but we did it! We were thankful for the extra time we blocked out to work on it. While making the 30 second video, we realized just how little information can be portrayed in that amount of time. So we promptly decided we needed to do second demo video to explain everything we wanted to say in the 30 seconds, but could not. Since we invested time in learning a video editing software, we decided to do a third video. This video would play through game structure on the board. We cleaned up the physical components with a second draft of cards and the board. Finally, we returned here, to the GitHub, to compile everything together so that you could explore our starmazing board game! Thanks for a great hackathon!
Thanks to our local lead, Fig O'Reilly, for her guidance and for answering all our questions. Thank you also to the subject matter experts, especially Henry Throop and Delia Santiago-Materese, for helping guide us to data sets and content to support our game!
References
The following resources were used to create this game! Resources below consists of images, data sets and informational websites.
Jupiter Destination Scenario and Mission Cards
- https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/water-on-europa-with-a-pinch-of-salt/
- https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection
- https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-research-reveals-europas-mystery-dark-material-could-be-sea-salt
- https://europa.nasa.gov/why-europa/ingredients-for-life/
- https://pds-rings.seti.org/jupiter/
- https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2021/033/01FAK3EK6KGRA8NJWGDSA7KMY7?news=true
- https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/jupiter-s-great-red-spot-a-rose-by-any-other-name
- https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/planets/jupiterpage.html
- https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-juno-finds-changes-in-jupiters-magnetic-field
- https://space-facts.com/moons/
Space Event Cards
- https://www.nasa.gov/centers/hq/library/find/bibliographies/space_debris
- https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html
- https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article239014303.html
Research Item Cards
- https://data.nasa.gov/dataset/SLUSH-Europa-Hybrid-Deep-Drill-Phase-I/yacq-mngp
- https://data.nasa.gov/dataset/RISE-UP-Ross-Ice-Shelf-and-Europa-Underwater-Probe/nrdf-6psr
- https://data.nasa.gov/dataset/Europan-Molecular-Indicators-of-Life-Investigation/4kk9-yw3c
- http://hiq.linde-gas.com/en/analytical_methods/mass_spectroscopy.html
- https://attic.gsfc.nasa.gov/huygensgcms/Mass_Spec_Intro.htm
- https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/sample-handling/
- https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/topographic-profiles-from-the-near-laser-rangefinder
- https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/RemoteSensing.html
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/2885033
- https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper
- https://europa.nasa.gov/
- https://epc.space/space-systems/lidar/
Other
Tags
#boardgame #Jupiter #Europa #Io #Callisto #Ganymede #spaceresearch #spacejunk #thematicgame #familygame #strategy #galileanmoons #art #spacegame #educational #adventure #sciencefiction #spaceexploration #dice #missioncontrol #NASA #sciencecommunications
Global Judging
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