Teleportals

Designing board games has been a daydream / fantasy career of mine all my life. I've poked at a few here and there. Anyway, I hallucinated the rules for a new game as I was falling asleep a couple of weeks ago. It's incredibly simple, and making the pieces took all of an hour or so.

The story concerns the travails of commuting to and from work a couple of hundred years from now. Despite the development of teleportals - doorways a pedestrian can use to instantly step to any other teleportal location merely by dialing the desired destination on a control panel - the traffic jams and hourly commute are still a fact of life. Because, you see, the portals can only connect to one location at a time, and they are in high demand. It *should* only take you one step to get from Grand Central Station to your home on the slopes of Olympus Mons, but as Murphy's Law would have it, someone else is using the Olympus Mons teleporter just now and when you dial it ... you get a busy signal. So, you settle for Syria Planum instead, hoping that gets you a bit closer to home.

In the game, several players compete to be the first to commute home from work - stopping for groceries and other errands on the way - via this chaotic system. The board consists of hexagonal pieces representing locations on Earth, Mars, Luna, and several space stations. The pieces are constantly being moved and reposititoned as the 'portals get reconnected to different locations.

So far I've had two brief playtests of the game with housemates and friends. The initial game mechanics and pieces seem to work out pretty well, but the goals and win conditions have been rewritten a couple of times. Last night's playtest determined that a couple more tweaks are needed to the pieces.

Anyway, it's a fun "spare time" project.