Modern Days: Big Dogs and Fat Cats
almost 5 years ago – Sun, May 19, 2019 at 10:37:30 PM

Hi,

Thank you for all of your support! In this update, we'll continue the story of Modern Days from Update #15 and #16 with a new narrative unlock!

While the original space race is long over, new competitions (and competitors) over the final frontier have emerged during the last decades. One of them is called a billionaire space race and points to the rivalry of private companies controlled by entrepreneurs who made their name in different industries. This rising contest is strikingly different than the original race between the US and the Soviet Union, as back then the development was driven mainly by the two governments and the race was towards exploration, discovery, and establishing political power through perceived ideological supremacy. It's all different now in the NewSpace because the innovation is driven by the private spaceflight industry that's motivated commercially.

Apart from SpaceX, two important players in the billionaire race are Jeff Bezos with his Blue Origin and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. Both companies aim to dominate the space in various ways. Blue Origin focuses on commercial space tourism, but they also strive to build a lunar base that would be perfect for constructing and handling heavy equipment thanks to the low gravity advantage. On the other hand, Virgin Galactic would love to offer flights between cities (imagine how much would your commuting be easier if you traveled at 4,800 km/h to work) that could be powered by their rockets. Virgin Galactic also wants to regularly send paying customers into the edge of outer space and so far, they've sold about 600 tickets. Finally, while it might seem that it's all for profit, there's the other side of the coin (the coin being the NewSpace rivalry) which shows ongoing optimization, innovation, and reduction of costs for future space projects.

Wait, and what is SpaceX up to? We'll see in tomorrow's part of the story!

Thank you very much for being part of the team!

Michal, Jan, and Marek

Modern Days: Your Feedback
almost 5 years ago – Sun, May 19, 2019 at 01:17:28 AM

Hi,

Thank you so much for your support throughout our mission and for being here with us! There's been a lot of feedback and suggestions regarding many different aspects of the game, and in this update, we'll address the most frequent points.

•  Your feedback and suggestions – check our replies to your most frequent questions.
•  New milestone reached – take a look at the report from the engineering team.
•  Modern Days continue with a new narrative unlock!

Your feedback and suggestions

First of all, thank you very much for taking the time to post in the comments section! We really appreciate all your feedback. Below, you can find our responses to the most frequent points that you've been addressing.

Historical aspects of Space Race – All events, people, technologies, etc. present in Space Race are purely historical (including several projects yet to be launched such as the Permanent Moon Base). The game, however, allow players to construct an alternate history so that it's possible to see the First Man in Space "played" in 1984. On the other hand, the game supports the theme with cards that we've designed so their abilities match the actual historical context whenever possible. A great example of this is Wernher von Braun, a leader card. His abilities reflect:

• Operation Paperclip in 1945 and the transition of German brains to the US by the end of WW2 — the card lets you draw 4 cards, which represents the newly acquired German rocket technology know-how.
• Von Braun being the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket — the card lets you instantly develop a technology without clashing with your opponents.
• His long contribution to NASA's technological progress as a director of the Marshall Space Flight Center — the card permanently boosts the technological level of your agency.

So that's how Space Race handles history.

Educational aspects of Space Race – Some of you have mentioned that it could be great to have more historical data present on the cards (such as a year in which an event happened, or a quote, etc.). This sounds very cool, and we worked with those ideas initially, mainly to accent the educational attribute of the game. However, this would have come at a high cost — since there's already a lot of iconography and game-related graphics on the cards, we didn't want to cover even bigger portions of the artworks with text. The reason was quite simple — we've observed that people were already attracted by the pictures so much that they started looking for more information about the events. For example, we've heard from several people on Facebook that they hadn't heard about the Wow! signal until they played Space Race (the original card game) and were totally surprised when they learned more about it. This was a clear signal to us that the mission of spreading the word about the space exploration has been successful. It also allowed us to keep a large portion of the card for the artworks.

Board – There was quite a discussion regarding the board and its attributes. One of the most frequent topics was the graphical representations of the board, and why we haven't used a more illustration-heavy style. The reason is simple — we actually had in one of the first iterations during the development. And it simply didn't work well. The cards are full of artworks and they just disappear when placed on a fully colored board. That's why we reset the design and chose another approach — the blueprint one.

Playmat add-on feedback – In Update #13, we asked about your opinion on the potential playmat add-on — and got around 200 positive responses. That's amazing and unbelievable! Thanks a lot to all of you! I think this is clearly a green light for us to start working on the playmat add-on. ;) You can expect it to be available through a pledge manager after the campaign. We will, however, post more information about it in one of the upcoming updates.

•  Q: Will the playmat fit in the game box? No, it will come with a separate box. Unless you're willing to bend it, of course (which is not recommended).

Print and Play – Some of you have asked for the PnP (work-in-progress) link. It's already present at the end of the How to Play section on the main campaign page, but to save you time, here's the link.

Will the digital translation bundles also include the cards (e.g. not just the rulebooks)? Yes, they will. All language-dependent resources that you might want to print will be available for download (the rulebook, cards look-up sheet, projects, player aids, etc.).

Proposed US tariffs

It seems that the trade war is going after the board games as well. :/ The US backers are concerned about their pledges (not only concerning this project), and we totally understand that. The tariffs are currently proposed, there will be public hearing on June 17, they may be activated anytime after July 24, and they could be of up to 25%. The actual uncertainty about the topic doesn't help either, especially considering small indie creators like us. However, at the moment we're quite confident to say that—should the tariffs become reality even in the worst proposed form—we'll still be able to absorb all additional US shipping costs. To support this, we're constantly investigating more options of avoiding or mitigating the issue should the tariffs take place. For example, we might transport the games to our warehouse in Europe first. We're in touch with the manufacturer, and they are also checking what can be done. We'll post more info on the topic as soon as we get more relevant news. Until then, fingers crossed that the tariffs will miss our beloved hobby, or influence it just barely, which is still one of the possible outcomes.

New Milestone Reached!

You are absolutely amazing! Thanks to your support, our engineering teem has announced that a new breakthrough was reached today: it's a silk screen print for the astronaut meeples! Yay!

Modern Days: Catching Up

The story of Modern Days from Update #15 continues with a new narrative unlock!

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) was formed in 1993, and it quickly joined the big league when its incredible technological advancements led to sending Yang Liwei to space only 10 years later. This made China #3 in the order of countries that sent people to space, but their plans are much bigger than that! Below, we'll take a closer look at three incredible technologies that China has at its disposal: a spherical telescope nicknamed The Eye of Heaven, Tiangong space station, and the Long March rocket family.

FAST: And HUGE. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope is exactly what is says. With its 500 meters across, it’s the largest of its kind and might very well be the one to find out if E.T. ever got home okay. FAST is meant to look for extraterrestrial civilizations in the vast universe, but don’t expect any decent internet connection around this thing – it needs radio silence to do its job. 

Tiangong space stations: Tiangong-1, China’s first space station, also known as Heavenly Palace 1 launched 29 September 2011 and since then became notable for another of China’s “firsts” – it had their first female astronauts over. Its successor, Tiangong-2, has been on space duty for a little over a year, having orbital rendezvous with spacecrafts. They say the Universe is infinite, but why risk cluttering it – both Heavenly Palaces are only 10 meters long with diameters of 3 meters.

Long March rocket family: Similarly to the Long March that is imprinted in Chinese history and from which this rocket family got its name, the Long March rockets are a symbol of traversing great distances and, generally, a brighter future. They continue to be synonymous for retreat; however, no longer to safety from enemy troops. This time, the destination is space, the final frontier. "NuqneH!"

What do you think about the three Modern Day achievements? We'll continue the story in the following update. 

Thanks again for being a part of this mission!

Jan, Marek, and Michal

Modern Days: Let's Play Solo!
almost 5 years ago – Sat, May 18, 2019 at 01:56:05 AM

Hi,

Welcome to the latest report from the command center! There really is a plenty of things we want to share with you today, but before we get to that, we’d love to thank you again for all your support of the playmat add-on that you have shown in the comments section of Update #13. We’ll definitely look into it further so stay tuned!

•  Solo playthrough – watch a one-round playthrough of the solo variant with commentary!
•  New milestone revealed – read a report from the engineering team!
•  Modern Days story begins with a new narrative unlock!

Solo playthrough

You’ve been asking for it and here it is – a video of Michal playing one round of Space Race solo against two AI opponents! Please bear with us here – as much as we love that we can you the solo game in detail, we are not videomakers. Nevertheless, we hope you’ll enjoy it! The video includes a commentary on what’s happening on the board and what the AI are doing so you can follow all the action. Michal just plays according to the standard multiplayer rules during the whole solo game.

An incredible thing about the AI in Space Race is that it works for normal multiplayer games as well! So, if there are, for example, only 2 of you but you want to play a 4-player game, you can just “connect” 2 AI opponents and you are good to go! It’s really easy (adding the opponents, not defeating them), as you can see from the video. Below is a summary of what the AI does during the round so you can get the idea of how much upkeep is there stage by stage:

•  Funding: AI puts a card form the Deck into their Lab
•  Unexplored Universe: add 1 card from the Deck for every AI
•  Control Cards: AI uses their top Control Card
•  Stage: AI takes the rightmost card
•  Stage: if AI is alone in a stage, it takes 1 card into their Lab from the Deck
•  Bureaucracy: if AI is dedicated, they move/add an astronaut
•  Stage Output: AI scores it for double the points
•  Lab scoring: AI scores it
•  Breakthrough scoring: AI moves an astronaut and then scores it
•  Closing project: AI scores the project

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!

New milestone revealed

We are getting really close to the next milestone (silk screen printed astronauts), so let’s take a look at what the next destination of our flight will be. If we reach the milestone below, we’ll upgrade all the Mission Progress tokens and the government Project tokens to have a thematic back side so you will really feel like you are going through the history while playing the game!

Modern Days: SpaceX

This is the first part of the Modern Days story series.

Everything started with a dream to grow plants on Mars inside small greenhouses, combined with little bit of effort to get all of the necessary equipment up there. At least that was Mars Oasis, a project that Elon Musk wanted to realize. Since it’s kind of hard to get on Mars without a proper launch vehicle, and given the excellent reputation of the Soyuz rocket, Must went to look for a few of them in Russia. Although this trip wasn’t successful (they were too expensive), he decided to just start a new company that would build the rockets he needed for the Mars Oasis.

In 2002, Elon Musk started the Space Exploration Technologies Corp., better known as SpaceX. Over the years, it’s focus was to create a completely reusable launch system that would greatly reduce the launch costs, and, therefore, make the space much more accessible. The road towards succeeding in the space industry wasn't easy, though, as a significant part of it in the US was dominated by the United Launch Alliance, a company combining the engineering power of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. It took SpaceX until 2015 to break this duopoly thanks to getting its Falcon 9 certified for launching national security space missions.

While it might sound a bit cheesy to say that the rest is history at one point or another, well... yeah. In the following years, SpaceX were able to secure an incredible number of world first’s, including the ones for

• launch, orbit, and recovery of a spacecraft by a private company (2010),
• landing the first stage of a rocket on land and on ocean platform (2015, 2016),
• relaunch and landing of a used orbital rocket stage (2017),

and just so many others.

Have you ever wondered what you would do if you had a few launch vehicles at your disposal? Well, find out during the game!

Thank you so much for your amazing support! We really hope that you will enjoy the solo playthrough. Let us know what you think about it!

Michal, Jan, and Marek

The Race: New Milestone Reached!
almost 5 years ago – Sat, May 18, 2019 at 01:16:17 AM

Hi,

The command center is back to report some amazing news! The first of them is that we have spent most of the day shooting a one-round playthrough (including a commentary) of the solo variant. Currently, we are editing the video which will hopefully be available tomorrow. We are incredibly happy to do this for you, but please, bear with us on this one – because we're not video makers, this task made quite a cut into our time management. However, we are still reading all your comments and listening to all the suggestions! Also, thank you so much for the gigantic support for the playmats that you have shown in the comments section of Update #13! Now let’s get to the news:

•  New milestone reached – read a report from the engineering team!
•  The Race continues with a new narrative unlock!

New Milestone Reached!

You are so amazing! Thanks to your help, the engineering team is proud to announce that the Deluxe Bundle will now come with a master box that will hold the base game and both expansions! It will also have a full-color artwork printed on the inside! Yay!

The Race: Buran

The story of The Race from Update #9, #10, #11, #12, and #13 continues with a new narrative unlock!

When the Soviets couldn't make the T1 work (we're sure you'll show them how it's done as soon as you are at the helm of their space agency), they moved on to a new project in 1976 – the Energia/Buran system – which was a direct response to the American Space Shuttle program and which should be able to dock the Mir space station. Buran was a Soviet version of a reusable shuttle, and Energia was its launch vehicle. The fact that the spacecraft looked almost identical as the U.S. Space Shuttle displeased the Soviet engineers; however, after extensive testing, they realized that there was nothing left to improve on considering the American design.

Unfortunately, Buran managed only a single launch (it was actually the first shuttle to perform unmanned orbital flight) before the project was cancelled in 1993 due to funding problems and a volatile political situation. All work on Energia ceased shortly after. There was one part of the whole project that saw further use, though: The Buran docking module was used on the U.S. Space Shuttles during the Shuttle-Mir missions. (Irony?)

This concludes the story of the Race. In the next update, we’ll delve into a completely different chapter of the space conquest.

Thank you for your amazing support!

Michal, Jan, and Marek

The Race: Playmats
almost 5 years ago – Fri, May 17, 2019 at 09:09:05 PM

Hi,

Thank you again for all the feedback that you have given us in the comments section, messages, and through the campaign survey (see Update #11). This was another amazing day so let's take a look at what's new in the control center:

•  Playmat add-on info – let us know if you would like one
•  The Race continues with a new narrative unlock!

Would you like a Space Race playmat?

One of the things that a lot of you are asking for is a playmat as an add-on. We have investigated the production and shipping requirements and are back with the results. The playmat would be:

• made of top quality rubber, 90x60 cm (35x24 in)
• double stitched for extra durability and more exclusive look
•  €25 plus additional €0-5 for shipping (based on the final packaging type and shipping destination)

So far so good. The tricky part comes when speaking about the minimal production volume. Given the size of the playmat, PandaGM (the manufacturer) informed us that the minimal production quantity is 500 pieces. That means—given that Space Race can easily end up as a Kickstarter only game without going to retail—it would take every fifth backer of Space Race (up to this day) to justify the manufacturing. This seems quite a big deal, but... 

…here’s how we could do it: If you are seriously interested in the playmat above, please leave a comment saying “YES” under this update to indicate you’d like us to work further on the playmat matter. Once the campaign ends, we will send out a survey where we will ask all the backers if they are likely to go for the playmat. If the results shows there’s a really wide and serious interest in it, we will make it available in a post-campaign pledge manager as an add-on.

That’s how we can, together, bring a playmat to Space Race. What do you think about it?

The Race: Against the Saturn V

The story of The Race from Update #9, #10, #11, and #12 continues with a new narrative unlock! 

Thanks to Project Gemini, which the United States started to support the development of the technology necessary for lunar landing, the US caught up with, if not overtook, the Soviet Union in the space race. As a response, the Soviets started working intensively on a super heavy-lift rocket, the N1, in order to get to the Moon first. This would be the biggest rocket that the Baikonur Cosmodrome has ever seen.

Although the N1-L3 (L3 being the lunar payload) was with its 105 meters a bit smaller than the Saturn V, it was capable of producing more thrust and total impulse. In fact, the first stage of the N1 is still the most powerful rocket stage in history.

The work on the N1-L3 started in 1965, so the US had almost 4 years of head start with their development of the Saturn V. Because of this, the engineering team felt they had to rush the project to level the playing field as quickly as possible. The engines of N1 were set up in a very complex way that required extremely difficult plumbing, which made the rocket very fragile. Furthermore, Sergei Korolev’s death in 1966 significantly impeded any attempts at progress. In the end, the rocket did make it into the history, but in a very different way than the Soviets anticipated. The second test launch saw the N1 explode shortly after liftoff in what is one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions the world has ever seen. It took a year and a half to repair the destroyed Baikonur launchpad.

All four test launches of the N1 failed, and the project was cancelled in 1976. The effort of the Soviet Union to send a cosmonaut to the moon fell completely apart.

Tomorrow, we will conclude the story of the Race. Thank you for being on this journey with us! Don’t forget to let us know whether you are interested in the playmat by leaving a comment in this update.

Michal, Jan, and Marek