Food Time Battle in Space

Development time:
July 2020 - May 2021
Food Time Battle in Space | 2-4 Players | Ages 14+ | 20-30 Minutes
Designed by Niall Crabtree
Art by Fodsley
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In Food Time Battle in Space, you are a restauranteur in the 1950s trying to take advantage of the recent colonization of the moon in this alternate version of Earth.
This game is a lite engine-building card game for 2-4 players with a healthy amount of randomness, but heaps of strategy, with four different decks, and four different playstyles to choose from.
Your goal is to be the first restaurant to five stars, and you do this by completing critic orders with your ingredients. You have to place ingredients down in the correct order, and to gain critic perks (which help you later in the game) you have to use luxury ingredients as well.
These critic perks are used to increase your handsize, redraw cards, play cards in different orders and discard cards, all in the name of creating the perfect meal for other critics. These abilities are your engine!

What did I do?

Cool Features
This section is going to be a very brief outline of what I did on this project. Please divert to the blog posts for a more in depth rundown of proceedings. 
  • Designed and developed Food Time Battle in Space from start to end. 
  • Ran 250+ playtesting sessions and QA sessions. The majority of this was QA as with four completely asymmetric ways to play, there was a lot of numerical balancing required.
  • Ran a successful crowdfunding campaign. 
  • Directed a live action trailer.
  • Art Direction.
  • Graphic Design. 
  • Narrative Design.
In my opinion, these are the coolest and most unique aspects of Food Time Battle in Space.
  • Four completely unique, asymmetric ways to play in the restaurants. 
  • Traditionally complicated rules explained well with just 1 A4 Sheet. 
  • Cards are designed to leave room for cool synergies which can change from game to game. Lots of room for mastery.
  • Push your luck and take that elements allow for newer players to feel like they have a chance to win their first couple of games against more seasoned opponents (veterans still have the edge from their knowledge of card combinations). 
  • The game is praised as a great gateway and filler game, meeting my design expectations.