Biohack by the designer of Kancil, Yofiandhy D Indrayana, will be launching on Kickstarter this Friday, a forum post on the game’s BoardGameGeek page has confirmed. The illustrations for the game are done by Tatsuki Asano and Iqbal Ridzuan with most of the trio new to the board games hobby in general.
In Biohack, players will create creatures from myth, seeking to overcome scientific stigma, secure enough funds, and acquire the necessary DNA to bring these strange beings to life. The game promises a unique worker placement system that “recycles workers over the course of a round” and a “milestone system,” along with other innovative twists. As of the time of writing, the Kickstarter campaign has 1571 followers.
The game will be published by uchibacoya, owned by Jonasan Uchibacoya who has been talking the game up on BoardGameGeek and helping it raise on The Hotness track. But what is Biohack? The publisher’s description tell you that the game, set for 1-4 players and playing over 60-90 minutes, will have you explore the fallout of Dr Johann Maischberger’s daredevil scientific research which raised, it seems, serious ethical questions.
Bringing Myths to Life
A specific case, described as the “Biohack Incident,” leads to Maischberger and his fellow researchers’ pariah status in academia. That is some 20 years prior to the events that take place in the game itself. Maischberger’s daughter is now trying to continue her father’s research by calling on the academics who were ostracized from the scientific community because of their involvement with the original Biohack experiment.
Biohack is advertised as a medium-complexity game, although the game’s BoardGameGeek rating shows a 1/5 in terms of how difficult you may expect the game to be to learn and play. Players will use their special meeples called “Noman” to secure funding for their research and find new DNA to use in bringing mythical creatures to life.
The game will go over a fixed number of turns until a player has been able to beat all other researchers to the punch and has created seven creatures.