Dark Rush - Board Game

There is a great deal of interest from national space agencies to go to the Moon and Mars. ESA wants to go to the Moon and establish a village there. NASA wants to go to Mars. Astronauts and Cosmonauts from all over the world are already living aboard the ISS. What can they do in their free time? It can’t be all about reading books or game play on computers. Think of new sports or games that could take into account the low gravity (e.g. a space lacrosse game, extreme basketball). What about real or virtual experiences involving the Apollo 11 landing site on the Moon? Or following the paths of Sojourner, Spirit or Curiosity on Mars using a form of cross-country skiing? Think of new ways for to astronauts to use their free time. To present your results develop an app that makes use of virtual reality tools.

On planet earth, we love taking a step back from reality by playing games. Often, these are based on bits of our everyday lives, like property buying in monopoly. So how will we play when we leave earth?

Take a second, use your imagination and picture yourself unwinding in a galaxy far far away in the not too distant future. At this point, you might have thought of something like this the Star Wars Cantina. If you look closely, you would have spotted a Dark Rush table in the corner.

For this Hackathon, we decided to do something a little bit out of the box and challenge ourselves to build a board game. As we dive into how it works, imagine the mechanics of air hockey and how magnets can be used to simulate gravity.

The board is a solar system, with planets orbiting the star. The planets are magnetic and move around through motors underneath the table. The star in the system sits at the core and has the strongest magnetic force of all. And since this is a Hackathon, we backed it up with science by creating a mathematical model of magnetic gravity in Matlab, reworking the code into Python.

As a player, you flick your asteroid puck across the system, taking advantage of the slingshots and orbital mechanics while avoiding the black holes or getting stuck. You don't want to lose your asteroids.

You're aiming for the pockets on the edge of the system, which hold resources, asteroids and keys to planetary control. Once you get a planet key, you can alter the gravity of the electromagnets in the planets to your strategic advantage. You win when you control all planets in the system or when your opponent loses all of their asteroids.

Over the weeknd, we made a bit of an arts and crafts corner to create the first prototype of the game from foam board, LEDs, an arduino and a lot of paint.

- Foam board

- Paint

- Arduino + LEDS

- Localised gravitational anomalies

- Magnets

- Magnetic Putty