Only four bugs left. Then you win the game. You roll the dice. A four – perfect! But the action dice shows that you have to draw a bug card. It is… the godfather of Bug Industries, the stag beetle. The meanest bug of them all. He looks at you with that dung-eating grin and gives you 16 new bugs…
Bug Industries is a game with cards and dice. Each player has an IT project assigned, in which a bunch of little, nasty bugs are hidden. 64 of these ulcer causing monsters must be eliminated for the project to run smoothly. The first bug-free player wins the game. This game is ideal for developers, admins and other IT people to have some fun in their usually short lunchbreaks. The game creators even wrote a simulation in JavaScript to bring the average game time under 20 minutes.
The game rules: On the game board – the headquarters of Bug Industries – you move your game chip up or down – depending on whether you can deduct or receive more bugs. You roll two dice: a numbered dice called “bug dice” and an “action dice.” The result of the bug dice can be directly deducted from your total bug count. The action dice gives you different options: pause, roll the dice again, draw a bugs card or draw a code card.
There are two kinds of bug cards: The good ones reduce your total bug count and the bad ones increase it. With the second type of cards (code cards) you can influence the whole game. While you have to play the bug cards immediately, you can keep the code cards for yourself without showing them to the other players and then play them when the time is right. Knowing when to drop the code cards on the other players is a key part of the strategy.
About the creators
Bug Industries was created by a small web company that fights against bugs in software on a daily basis. On one of those days where everything went wrong and literally endless bugs were crawling out of every corner of the project, the idea came up: Wouldn’t it be awesome to face these bugs in real-life and kick their asses? But how can you get software bugs into the real world? Of course – through a game. This was the starting point for Bug Industries.
The Simulation
In the following months, concepts were made, game rules designed, cards snipped, dice 3D printed, the bugs illustrated until everything was perfect. Except one thing: The average game time, which could go up to 45 minutes and more.
But how could this be fixed? 20 minutes was the ideal game time, so you can play Bug Industries during lunch or before you leave the office to go home. But how many of the different bug cards & code cards should be in the game? And which values should be more represented than others? The solution was a simulation written in JavaScript that can run 100,000 games in 20 seconds. This helped to identify the perfect ratio for the cards. The result? A game that takes exactly 20 minutes. Guaranteed. Almost always.
Check out the campaign here.
Check out the company website here.
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Media Contact
Company Name: BUG INDUSTRIES
Contact Person: Media Relations
Email: info@bug.industries
Country: Germany
Website: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/timpietrusky/bug-industries-a-card-dice-game-for-us-it-nerds