Star Sailors teaches middle-school aged children about astronomy with tense gameplay and risk-reward factors.
Our Approach
As a group of three, our biggest goal with Star Sailors was to create a board game that takes less than ten minutes to learn and offers suspense at every turn, culminating in a thrilling end to every game.
Vision and Innovation
To accomplish this, we envisioned a combination of principles from Sorry and Life, while combining random risk/reward factors into the game that players have the option to interact with.
Education Goals
Having to make our game educational, we leveraged trivia to teach players facts about the Milky Way, which rewards players in-game for correctly answering questions. We also made sure to display the names and correct order of the planets on the game board, which serves to passively educate players and help them to remember their names.
UX/UI Integration
With the goal of Star Sailors being to travel to every planet and return to Earth, we needed a way to track player's progress through the solar system. To do this, we built a companion website in Figma that houses rules, planet tracking, and a random card generator for the game's risk/reward feature.
Click here to try the Figma demo!
Building Tension
To create tension, Star Sailors leverages a few game mechanics:
Asteroids: players are free to land on an asteroid any time they come across one, which triggers a random card draw that contains either a detrimental or beneficial consequence.
Banking: when players land on a planet, they collect a corresponding chip. Players can only carry a few of these chips at a time, so they have to seek out space stations to "bank" their chips. However, other players are able to chase them down and steal their chips.
Conclusion
Star Sailors turned out as a successful, fun, and tense game that all of our testers were asking to play again.
