From the creators of A Perfect Year comes LifeWriter, a future-fantasy experimental board game specializing in personalized genetics.

Based on Michio Kaku's explanation of personal genetic engineering devices in the near future, you play as a team of varied scientists hired to take part in a genetic experiment on a high tech base in deep space. Spearheaded by the illustrious Precipice Technologies and led by the elusive Professor Eldar Pricipian himself, you are each granted a LifeWriter, a futuristic typewriter that types in nucleobases. 

Using these genetic engineering devices, the scientists are tasked with an immense challenge of divine proportions - invent the first biological god. They must act quickly to prevent the threat of invasion from a rouge artificial intelligence and the spread of a mysterious plague through humanity's interstellar colonies.

Check out the "Story" tab to dive deeper into the lore of LifeWriter. 

​

Each of the scientists use their respective skillset and specialty to be the first to create a divine being out of the most amazing and empowering traits found in nature, living beings, and beyond. When the time and funding for the project has dried up, there will be only one way to tell who has truly created the superior being - the creations will have to battle to assert their evolutionary dominance. Only then will it be known to all of existence who is the ultimate LifeWriter.

​

The game employs turn-by-turn sequencing of traits, where the player starts their turn by drawing nucleobases from the collective gene pool, and then has to choose to type and print a simple sequence from their acquired Trait cards or to begin building up to a better trait by typing out a part of the sequence and then ending their turn, risking failure of the sequence if they don't acquire the required nucleobases in order to print their desired trait, which leads to a heightened instability of their creation. Once the creation reaches a certain level of instability, it will kill its scientist, removing that player from the game.

Each scientist has their own specialty, allowing them to create traits of a certain type for less nucleobases, and also granting each a unique U-based trait that inputs their own DNA into the creation for unexpected results and repercussions. Each player will have to try and build up the best and most balanced creation they can code, while simultaneously sabotaging the other players' supplies and equipment in order to gain an unfair advantage. Once the time has come to unveil their creations, each beast will battle the other using the skills and stats acquired from their unique traits in order to destroy or consume the others in order to become humanity's new god. 

The playtesting for the game has already provided a lot of positive feedback. This has been a really fun project to work on so far, and we are trying to make it both entertaining and slightly educational in our explanation of certain traits, such as the antibacterial qualities of shark skin, the incomprehensible speed of theoretical tachyon particles, the asexual rebirth of the Immortal Jellyfish, the extreme resilience of bacteria even more resilient than tardigrages tested under extreme Diamond Anvil Cell pressures, cells with self-replicating telomeres approaching immortality (including cancer cells), and many other interesting facets and features of nature and nurture. By giving the players access to all of these amazing traits, we hope to challenge them to really think about what is possible in our future as scientists and as programmers. Maybe one day we will yield LifeWriters ourselves, and that is a mind-expanding thought and opportunity for exploration and experimentation, if only through gameplay for the time being.