A tabletop game designed for the Gaming Like It's 1928 public domain game jam.

In April 1928, our sun hit its most active phase of the 16th recorded 11.5-year solar cycle.  Auroral activity increased over both poles, wireless communication was disrupted, and disturbing theories arose about how this extreme solar activity was affecting people’s behaviour.

At the same time, Richard Buckminster Fuller was imagining new ways to live on Planet Earth, and he drew his first sketches of the Dymaxion House, the “living machine of the future.”

Were these events connected?  There will surely be some who say so.  It would be far from the wildest theory connecting terrestrial effects to the turmoil on the sun’s surface as it shot solar flares 10 times the size of the Earth into space.

In this game, each player will build and maintain a Dymaxion house, based on Buckminster Fuller’s original 1928 plans.

The houses will be bombarded with the cosmic wind arising from extreme solar activity and players must see who can have their house best survive.

Players will use the Mt. Wilson Observatory solar data to determine the nature of the solar activity and damage, and apply that damage to each other’s houses. Plan well, make strategic repairs, and see whether your Dymaxion house will live to the future.

Sources

The solar activity sketches were hand-drawn by astronomers at Mt. Wilson throughout 1928.  There are 321 drawings corresponding to the clear-sky days, including the February 29 leap day.

The Dymaxion player board is a reconstruction from Buckminster Fuller’s 1928 sketch of the idea, shown on the cover page of this game.  A photograph shows a model Buckminster Fuller constructed. Two prototype Dymaxion houses were built over subsequent decades but the scheme never took off.

All text in this game is set in Gill Sans, a humanist sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards.

Newspaper clippings are taken from The Los Angeles Times, Jul 8, 1928; The Hong Kong Daily Press, Sept 21 and Oct 23, 1928; and the Chinook Advance, Alberta Canada, June 21, 1928.

Designer notes

See the attached document for details of the historical artefacts from 1928 that go into the game, the science of sunspots, the architecture and engineering of the Dymaxion House and notes about the game concept.