If the 1980s had a tabletop card game, RESISTOR_ would be it

My friend's tabletop card game, RESISTOR_: Hacking on the brink of nuclear destruction comes to its close on Kickstarter in just a few hours. If you haven't heard about it yet, here's the promo video:

It's been a great run for Nicole and her partner Anthony, but it's not over yet. They met their goal early, and buzz about the game has been great, so they are setting a mystery prize-goal-thingee at a level four times their initial goal. Can they do it?

As I thought about this post, I realized that if there's a story here, it's in these three points:

great games are made by women but few know this,

great games can be simple,

great games don't get to be famous unless there's a groundswell of support from friends, friends of friends, and strangers--all saying, "Huh. That looks cool. I'm going to support it by buying a copy."

I was one of those early sponsors who supported RESISTOR during its first day. Word spread quickly via facebook, twitter, vine, instagram and online communication, and I thought about how much easier it is to connect with like-minded hobbyists and enthusiasts now as compared to the 1980s (the deacde in which I like to imagine these supercomputers battling it out). If you were lucky, you had access to compuserve or usenet. Most of the time, the newsletter arriving via the post office was the way enthusiasts kept in contact over vast distances. Maybe that's the point here:

Perhaps someday RESISTOR will have a digital version that we can play online--who knows, maybe we'll be reading a review by Chris Grant over at Polygon--but for now this game, that has set itself in the early days of the digitally networked world, that uses so many of the tropes that lay the groundwork for our current world in which we meet without really meeting, asks us to be in the same room to play it. It's wonderfully ironic.

I really hope RESISTOR reaches its new goal and Nicole unlocks the mystery at 40K. Heck, I hope the 705 backers turns into 7000 backers. I can't wait to see what Nicole and Anthony have planned.

I'm looking ahead to a few months from now, to the first time(s) that we all sit down to play this. I think that part of the magic of that first time will be this: all of the people that came together online to support this game, will be able to come together IRL.

And we'll be pretending to be computers trying to hack into each other. I love it.