Hey everybody, very excited to find this group and to have a sounding board for game designs!!
I’m a total newbie to board games, started playing real games about a year ago and haven’t looked back since.
Favorite games in my collection: Barrage, Great Western Trail, Pipeline, TM.
Game I’m currently working on: The Drake Machine
So yeah, I guess that’s the main reason I’m here. I’ve had this game idea knocking around in my head for 2-3 months, and started fleshing it out with a buddy of mine. We’ve played rough prototypes of the game a few times, and I’m getting close to the point of finalizing rules etc. There still a looooong way to go, but I’m loving the process! Find myself thinking about the game randomly and coming up with ideas I want to try.
I guess that’s all for now. Now I’m going to hunt around this forum for a good place to start sharing my game idea in more detail.
Excited to be a part of this!
I suppose here is as good a place as any to post some more deets about my idea?
The premise of the game, tentatively titled The Drake Machine, is the following (from my draft rule book):
“Francis Drake wondered why alien life was never found in the universe. In the limitless expanse, surely we must not be alone. In time, humans learned the truth: we’re not alone, we’re just first. Life happened to evolve first on a random planet called Earth, and while the rest of the universe was seeded and primed for life, all it needed was...time.
Enter the Drake Machine. Harnessing the energy of a singularity, humans have learned to manipulate space time itself. In order to let life bloom in the universe, the Drake Machine was built. This probe would be sent out into the universe with a singularity on board, and as it travelled it would send out graviton pulses that would warp time itself in order to cause eons to pass in an Earth instant. This way, life in the rest of the universe could catch up to us, and we would no longer be alone.
The Drake Machine is visible on the left side of the board. As it travels outward into the universe, it will cause time to advance every time it hits a new zone. All creatures on all planets in that zone will then immediately gain 1 free action of their choice, free of charge.”
So I guess that sort of describes the premise. Essentially the game is a big blank board of the universe, with possible habitable systems throughout. The players each represent a race of humans that have adapted to different environments. Each race send a “spore” out on a rocket towards these other solar systems. ONce the rocket arrives, a planet is discovered with different biomes.
The meat of the game is in engineering your spore and shaping the planets so that your brand of life thrives and spreads to other planets.
As you might imagine, I’m in to space. The Drake Machine refers to Francis Drake. THere are elements of astrobiology and evolution in the game, I think it’ll be cool if I can smooth out the corners. I have a draft rule book written but there are a few key mechanisms that I am still working on. Once I have those ironed out so that the game is fully playable, I’ll post my rule book and maybe start looking for playterstes or upload a version to TTS.