Race to the Red Planet is a space adventure board game I worked on with 3 friends for IMS 212 The Design of Play. We received an honorable mention in 2015 at the Miami University Student Game Awards for our work. In the game, players race their ships to Mars, surpassing obstacles and upgrading their ships along the way. Once they get to Mars, they must turn around and eliminate the competition. It’s a game inspired loosely by roguelike video games in that it is brutally difficult at first and gradually gets easier as you learn the ropes and identify the strategies of you opponents. Together, we spent hundreds of hours designing the game, my role consisting of graphic design, systems design/prototyping, and playtesting.
I helped to design the board and cards and fully designed and wrote the rulebook for Race to the Red Planet. We worked together to 3D print Maya models of our pieces to make the project as polished as possible.
Designing the game was a tough team endeavor that took us far more than the allotted class/homework time to complete. The results were worth the time invested however, and the experience is something I’ll always cherish. I learned very distinctly how to juggle different opinions and ideas and channel them into a single artistic vision. I learned that iteration is paramount when trying to reach the optimal outcome, and that even weird, peculiar, or unorthodox ideas can bear fruit if you don’t shoot them down right away.
Below is the video we produced outlining the rules of Race to the Red Planet, and gives a good look at all of the materials needed and our goofy freshman selves.
All too often group projects for classes can become an exercise in futility, but myself and my three friends/classmates were able to work cooperatively to produce something we were very proud of and a game we still play time-to-time with friends, relatives, and housemates.
For reference, here is the game’s rulebook I designed and wrote:
Berto Ritger 