Spaceship 47

Spaceship 47 is a board game I am working on that is based on a 90s Sci-fi TV show that I came up with when I was a teenager. Just to be clear, it never went beyond the idea stage – there is no TV show called Spaceship 47. 🙂

The Design Goals:

• Have the feel of a 90s TV show like Deep Space 9, Babylon 5 or Stargate SG-1
• Quick set up – Once you’ve decided to play an episode of Spaceship 47, you should be playing within 5 minutes.
• Characters with story arcs – each player chooses one character which they will play for the entire 12 episode campaign, with an ongoing story arc that the player must achieve for their character by the end of the campaign
• A dynamic map – each character and any enemies that the characters encounter will be represented by minis and will move around a map that can change, based on story reasons or decisions by the players
• 12 episodes – partly to save my sanity and partly as campaign board games can fizzle out and never get completed, I will create a twelve-episode season that the players will go through. More like Pandemic Legacy than Gloomhaven.
• Eliminating Rules That Stop the Game – Nothing frustrates me more than when we are in the middle of a game, things are nice and tense, we are on the verge of victory or defeat and then the game comes to a grinding halt because we have to look up a rule, or work out line of sight etc. So as every game designer has ever said, my goal is to eliminate this.

I will stop there as I don’t want to overdo it on my first post back 🙂