Cooperative tabletop game to save the Earth from an approaching Asteroid!

Eric Teo + Jonathan Moormann + Ben Poland + Karina Popp
Class:
Instructor:

For our final assignment for Professor Eric Zimmerman’s Game Design I class, Benjamin, Jonathan, Karina and I created a cooperative tabletop game. 4 players are required and it takes about 40-50 minutes to play. Players take control of a region and must work together to stop an approaching Asteroid from devastating Earth!

Players do this per round by first resolving an event card and then performing up to 3 actions which can be rolling for resources or contributing resources or activating items on the board. There are two methods to destroy the asteroid and that is by firing missiles or landing a special team on the asteroid and planting bombs at strategic locations to blow it up. All this time however, the asteroid will be heading closer and closer to Earth and players still need to contend with the events which will make gathering resources trickier.

We started the design with a vision for a meaty tabletop game unlike most of the other games we have designed so far for the class. We wanted co-opetition but to ensure the design was balanced and sound, we decided to ensure we made a good cooperative game instead. Country cards art was designed by me and Karina designed the main board’s art and layout.

One of the biggest challenges we faced was balancing the countries’ powers and the event cards. We constantly had to tweak the values so as to make for a challenging enough experience but still give the players a chance to actually win the game.

One of the best lessons I learnt was the use of the plotter printer as well as 3D printing to create the asteroids, mines and rocket ship for the game!