As part of our work under my Early Career Researcher Award grant from the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science, we have been developing outreach materials to share the excitement of space exploration with the public. We've previously run two events at the Ontario Science Centre and now we have created a home version. While you won't find this board game in stores, we've made the game freely available to all. Just download the template, print it out, assemble and enjoy.
by Dr. Christina Smith
So as you may have already read, we here at the PVL have put on an event known as the Rover Exploration Challenge, where members of the public take the role of scientists on a rover mission to the unknown planet of “Arduinna”, using the “rover” to explore the planet to find out whether it is habitable. If you want to find more about the Rover Exploration Challenge event, take a look at Charissa’s blog post http://york-pvl.blogspot.com/2018/10/a-successful-rover-exploration-challenge.html
After successfully doing this challenge a few times and for a range of audiences, John posed the question of whether there was any way we could package it into something people could take home and play themselves, like a board game. I grew up playing board games with my family and friends (everything from standard kids board games all the way up to seriously long games – and yes I used to lose those a lot) so I took the lead on the conversion.
It’s gone through a few iterations over the last couple of months, where it went from something that looked like this (yes there is quite a lot of sharpie on those cards...):
to something that looks a little more like the photo at the top of this article, but with a cuter looking rover:
The essence of the challenge is still the same: you play the role of a scientist on a space mission, exploring an unknown planet using a rover to take measurements so you can complete science goals (or “projects”) and therefore find things out about the planet.
Each turn is made up of three phases:
• a planning phase
• a rover execution phase
• end-of-turn phase
In the planning phase, players take it in turn (beginning and ending with the Mission Lead – this role rotates around) to place an action on the rover’s plan. When the plan is full, the rover executes the plan in plan not placement order (very important). After everything has been executed, the turn ends and the Mission Lead role gets passed on.
The things that the rover can do are take different kinds of measurements (moisture, surface, or atmosphere) and this deposits little measurements on the hex (hexagonal card) the rover is on. It can take a panoramic image to reveal hexes around where the rover currently is, it can drive (move one hex), or the player can play a card.
But, things aren’t as simple as that. Sometimes in real life, rover actions fault, instruments get damaged, and generally the rover suffers wear and tear. To bring this into the game, each player has to roll two dice for the action they placed (except play a card). If the number they roll is higher than the number for that instrument on the Fault Track (btw: there is a fault track, all instruments and the drive start at 3) then that action is go. Otherwise, not only does your action fault and you get nothing for it, but your instrument (or drive) suffers wear and tear and that instrument (or drive...) increases one number on the fault track. So if you’re lucky you can get through the game with minimal damage, but what mostly happens is something takes an initial ding somewhere and then it just gets worse from there. But, all is not lost. An instrument (you guessed it – or drive) can’t be damaged higher than level 7, though that’s still pretty brutal given that over half of your uses of that instrument are likely to fail with level 7...
But, once per game there is a Hail Mary. In real life, rovers are sent up with redundancies as we can’t just send someone up to fix it or replace a part. This also means the main computer. You may not know, but Curiosity swapped computers relatively early on into its mission due to problems it was having (you can read more about it here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20130228.html). So to simulate the redundancies, once per game you can do a full Rover Reset, which takes all your fault levels down to 3. But it takes a whole turn phase. The last time I played, we left it too late and failed the mission.
Oh, did I not tell you about mission failures? Well you have to regularly pump out results (aka complete projects) otherwise you fail your mission. You complete a project by using the Play A Card action, removing the measurements from the hexes that that project needs (and once they’re gone, they’re gone) and that gives you Science Points. Oh and there’s also events that you can play to help yourself or hinder your teammates....
And what do Science Points get you? At the end of the game – VICTORY.
We’ve put together a pack so that people can freely download it, make it, and play it – and we’d love to know if you do!* You can find it here: www.yorku.ca/jmoores/RoverExplorationGamePack_v2.pdf .
Just as a heads up, its published under a Creative Commons, No Derivatives, Non-Commercial, Share-A-Like license, so you’re free to download it, play it, share it around, but you can’t sell it without our permission, you can’t change it and then pass that changed version on without permission etc etc (see the Creative Commons site for more info on that, or drop us a message!).
Also a quick thanks to all the family members and friends who played the game in whatever incarnation it was at the time. Some of those were pretty rough around the edges and we really appreciate it!
Happy gaming!
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*A note from John: this game was made possible in part through a grant to support youth outreach. If you enjoy the game and end up playing it with anyone 18 years old or younger, we would appreciate hearing about it at jmoores@yorku.ca - part of our grant management responsibilities include reporting back to our funding agency about how many youth we have reached through our program.
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