We’re past the halfway mark in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, and Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, and today we’re taking a look at the winner of Best Deep Cut: Solar Storm 1928 by David Harris.
As you probably know, David has been a repeat winner in this jam ever since his first entry, and Solar Storm 1928 continues his track record of submitting games that blow our mind with their creativity and uniqueness. It’s a tabletop game that forges a connection between two very different works from 1928: Buckminster Fuller’s design for the Dymaxion House (a futuristic home design that sought to “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input”) and a huge collection of sketches from astronomers at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, documenting solar storm activity. Some of Fuller’s sketches just scream out to be used as game board, so that’s where things begin: with each player designing their own Dymaxion House by placing the walls and furniture on the floorplan, already outfitted with some futuristic fixtures.
Next, the true game begins, as the players subject each others’ houses to acute damage caused by solar activity across a series of rounds, while struggling to keep their own houses together by making repairs, rearranging doors and furniture, installing reflectors, and utilizing special tools like the bathroom fogger and vacuum pump. This is already enough for an extremely cool game about Fuller’s design — you could have players rolling dice or using some other simple source of randomness to determine the amount of damage. But this is where Solar Storm 1928 goes a step further, and reaches for a true deep-cut public domain source. The amount of damage that players must contend with is instead generated by having each turn represent a day of the year (players can begin the game on any date they choose), then pulling the actual documented solar storm activity for that day from the collection of Mt. Wilson Observatory sketches. A simple analytic process laid out in the rules translates each sketch into a number of damaged tiles for the round.
As play proceeds, the player grids fill up with damage and alterations, until one house fails entirely at which point all the houses get scores based on how they held up.
As with all the designer’s past winning games, Solar Storm 1928 isn’t just mechanically interesting, it’s also a thoughtful and playful reflection on the works it draws from. This time, the game also includes a full separate booklet of Designer Notes, discussing and explaining the origin and nature of this reflection: inspired by visits to old observatories and a fascination with their handwritten records, leading to the discovery of the sunspot sketches which in turn sparked thoughts of architecture and engineering. The game then emerged as a way to explore “the tension between the idea of the universe being difficult, and humans trying to make up for it.” For succeeding wonderfully in this reflection while offering fun and engaging gameplay, all grown from the seed of some technical drawings in an observatory’s archives, Solar Storm 1928 is this year’s Best Deep Cut.
Congratulations to David Harris for the win! You can get everything you need to play Solar Storm 1928 from its page on Itch. plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.
