Hey, gang – I’ve recently had to face the hard fact that it’s a good time to retire my StarSpeed tabletop game project. It was a fun idea that I put a lot of work into developing – a tabletop racing game that functioned similarly to the popular ‘kart’ style racing video games like Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing, etc. But the fact is, I haven’t put in the time needed to get it really working right, and now another well-backed company is putting out a game so similar that I would rather just play that one instead.

This summer, Brotherwise Games (Boss Monster, Overboss) launched a Kickstarter for their newest game set in their popular Boss Monster theme: Dungeon Kart. By its description, it’s very similar to StarSpeed in many respects – it’s a Kart-styled racing tabletop game for 2-8 players, with a modular racetrack built from hexagon-shaped tiles. Each player gets to choose a racer with different abilities, and has a ‘dashboard’ where they can track their current speed. There are actions that racers can play against each other to hinder them on the track. To say I was disheartened by the similarities isn’t telling the whole story, really.

Brotherwise managed to solve a lot of the problems I was having with my own design, namely how the track pieces would be structured, and the player pieces themselves. They add mechanics like Coins, terrain difficulty, and even a ‘Placement’ board that keeps track of who’s in first place. All in all, it’s simply a more developed idea than I was able to get to with StarSpeed, and I have to think that playing it will scratch the itch that I was angling for in the first place. The Kickstarter’s over, and I’m looking forward to getting my copy when they start shipping.

So, yeah. They were first to market with this concept, and frankly have a better-looking final game than I had in my latest iteration, so I’m happy enough to just let this one go and move on to other things. I’ve already begun pulling reference to StarSpeed off of various gaming sites. I’ll still make sure to put all the artwork into my portfolio, though. It was fun work, and I’m still proud to show it off.

At some point I may choose to revisit this concept of a racing game set in space. I could go back to some of the earlier concepts of having to navigate around the gravity wells of different planets and objects to try to gain speed. It’s a complicated mechanic, though, and there are reasons it ended up not being a part of the most recent versions of StarSpeed. In the meantime, I’ve got other games I want to work on more, including tweaking and updating some of my oldest abstract strategy games… again.

One thing I have been thinking about, is how simple it might be to make a custom set of Dungeon Kart-compatible track tiles based on the StarSpeed tracks and planets. Probably wouldn’t include the homeworlds mechanic, but just use the art and make it a fun set of tracks. Set up a few tracks with asteroid belts, meteor showers, gamma rays, black holes, those kinds of obstacles. Make them work with the dashboards and action cards that will be a part of Dungeon Kart, and just put them out there for free as a print-and-play expansion. If I really feel like it, I could even set them up through TheGameCrafter as a POD expansion, and even go so far as to create some StarSpeed-themed player pawns as well. Who knows?