WARPDRIVE
from Dr Grafix: Balm Beach, Ontario, Canada

Developed in 2008, Drinking and Driving was just a fun cottage game that Dr Grafix designed to be played while enjoying weekends at the cottage. Over the years it was tested and the play became more challenging by getting rid of the unecessary game pieces that just complicated the strategy.
Each player in the original game had pickup trucks, hydro electricity at their cottage, cases of cold beer and the board was laid out to mimic the Balm Beach, Ontario cottage area.
There was only one prototype of the game made and although I was able to print a board and a box top for it, we still used Risk pieces as cases of beer, and little plastic dollar store pickup trucks. It was played almost every summer weekend until the crowd found Playstation and Smartphones.

The game sat idle for almost 10 years in a closet until Covid struck cottage country and we all needed a distraction. What was left of the game was recovered and presented to a newer group of cottage friends. Being somewhat more mature, the name Drinking and Driving didn't sit well with the adults in the room and the pickup trucks no longer played a role in the strategy of the game.
Returning to the drawing board, the Doctor reworked the game without a theme and called it KALA. Purely strategy and very simple rules to follow. Every player having the opportunity to prevent others from winning while developing their own winning strategy. As expected, without a good theme, it failed to intice group play and once again shelved.

Fast forward to the Crypto boom. The Doctor retooled KALA with a crypto theme. Instead of beer and cottages, instead of squares and tokens, we now had Crypto currency and an urban city centre instead of cottages. The game itself didn't change but the crypto thing sparked a little interest in playing again. The rules were the same and the strategy was the same but there was just something that made the play somewhat awkward to grasp for some. Moving crypto wallets through blockchains and purchasing city blocks with profits really seemd to be foreign to many weekend cottagers. Most would rather dig out Monopoly or Clue. It was time to re-invent the wheel. A year later lightening struck while watching re-runs of Star Trek and the game took on a new theme that actually made sense!

WARPDRIVE was born! And after a few weeks of playing, it became clear that this was the best theme for this abstract. Using the analogy of warp travel to explain how the pieces moved made a lot more sense. The board became the galaxie and the cottages, and city blocks became planets. The pickup trucks and crypto coins became starships. Play was easy to comprehend and even easier to play. The strategy became the driving force behind the play while the players are playing in a space environment.
Players move their starships through the galaxy using a wormhole unseen by the other players. Players drop out of warp with their fleet and conquer the opposing player's planet. Moving the same number of spaces in the wormhole as it takes to travel to another planet. It all makes sense!

The WARPDRIVE board is about 15 inches by 15 inches. Each planet is approximately 2 inches in diameter. There are 5 planets of each colour and one sun. The pink planets are unoccupied at the start of the game and can be conquered by any of the players. The game is a four person game, it could be played by 3 but we never had a good game with just three. Each planet is one light year apart and each turn takes one light year. To start the game each player chooses a colour and places 5 starships on each planet of their colour. Players decide who goes first and play moves in a clockwise rotation around the table.

Each player gets a wormhole card to set in front of them. The wormhole card is also about 15 wide. As players move their starships along the wormhole one space at a time, they are actually moving around the galaxy one planet at a time. The other players can see how many spaces they have travelled but don't know which direction they are travelling in space. The object of the game is to capture 5 planets in a row and win the game. Dropping out of warp drive with a fleet of starships onto another player's planet and conquering it is the key to winning the game. There are a few rules that give the game a twist in the strategy, for example, one cannot land on an opponent's planet unless they have more starships than the opponent.

In place of actual starships, these coins have done quite nicely. They are simple wooden coins in four different colours and available from Temu for about a penny a piece. If this game does become popular enough to mass produce, I think die cut starships might look nice, but they still need to stack as multiple starships are expected to occupy a planet. Any suggestions from gamers with experience building games would be awesome.

In order for everyone to remember which planet the fleets of starships travelling through the wormhole have originated, these stamped coins do the trick nicely. Each player gets a set of 6 stamped coins in their colour. It is a simple task to draw these shapes on the coins in play.Each player gets 3 sets of identical shapes. Placing one coin of the planet that the fleet originated and placing an identical coin on the fleet in the wormhole keeps track of the movement of the fleet. Without these "warp detector coins" nobody would be able to rememberwhere the fleet in the wormhole originated and serious arguments would happen. Likely turning into broken marriages or worse!
LOL ... Seriously though - it is the only thing that holds this game together.