Cysmic: A Disaster Movie Turned into a Board Game!?

If you’re here reading this, that means you’re probably a fan of movies! Even better, you’re probably a fan of JoBlo! My name is Jason Blake, sometimes I go by Jason Dean, and if you’ve been around here for a while, you’ve seen articles, YouTube shows, and most definitely heard my voice in JoBlo content. If you follow our coverage at Comic-Con, then you’ve most definitely seen me or heard me over the years as I covered Cosplay and celebrity interviews, among various other opportunities afforded to me. Because of my longevity and history here, JoBlo himself, Berge, has given me this brief moment on the site to tell you guys about my newest personal project that may tangentially be related to many JoBlo readers.

I don’t know about you, but my love of movies bleeds into most other things I do too. And for me, it’s particularly my love of Roland Emmerich movies that has influenced my most recent side project.

I wanted to make an interactive disaster movie but I wanted people to experience it together as a group. My love of disaster movies and my love of tabletop board games ended up meshing together into my latest creation, Cysmic.

If board games aren’t for you, then by all means click away to the movie content that JoBlo is known for. However, if you love disaster movies and play board games, you might want to stick around.

6 years ago, I started working on a board game that was meant to be a crown jewel of someone’s game collection. I wanted the best components, the best gameplay, and to create memories and experiences between friends in a disaster movie-style setting. Finally, after all of this time, I have finished work on it. However, I can’t make it alone. The cost of something like this is extremely prohibitive to do upfront. So I turned to the world of crowdfunding, specifically Kickstarter. I know, I know… trust me, I know what you’re thinking because I thought it too.

While JoBlo is not responsible or associated with this project, Berge was kind enough to allow me to tell the audience of JoBlo about my game because he and I share an entrepreneurial spirit, but more because it really could be of interest to so many readers here that fall into both categories of movies lovers and board gamers.

If you’re still with me, allow me to tell you about it, and then you can decide for yourself if this is something you would be interested in.

Cysmic is a dynamic sci-fi tactical objective game for 2-6 players set on the dying planet of Kepler-62e featuring a wrapping dual-layered game board and nearly 200 miniatures! As the leader of one of many factions fighting desperately to survive, it’s your job to build a colony ship and be the first to launch your people to safety. There’s just one problem. Each faction holds a module blueprint crucial for your survival!

This is a game about destruction, aggression, and earth-shattering pandemonium. While a good strategy and focused tactics can progress you toward your goal quickly, long-term planning goes out the window the second the earth splits. 

Fracture events leave devastation in their wake, causing more and more of the surface to crumble away as time goes on. Between fracture events, discovery cards, relics, random events, and dice-based combat, luck plays an important role. In the end, it all comes down to one deciding factor—your ability to adapt, overcome, and embrace the chaos.

Cysmic actually has a lot of lore and universe-building behind it. Let me explain the story leading into the game.

“Earth’s world council selected several leaders in various fields to lead an odyssey to Kepler-62e for terraforming and civilization planning. Some of the members were chosen and funded by the World Council while others self-financed their way to have influence or presence in the new world. Industry experts, religious leaders, entertainers, scholars, businessmen, politicians, and entrepreneurs all took part in the mission. Once there, the project worked beautifully… at first. The different groups of people lived and worked together as a familiar society with all of the benefits and growing pains one would expect from a newly formed civilization. It had its share of infighting and corruption, but even those issues never threatened the delicate balance of this new world. It was slowly becoming the utopia many had hoped it would.

As the project moved forward, an unexpected instability in the terraforming process started wreaking havoc on the landscape. The news broke quickly that their efforts to terraform and create a better world had destabilized the planet. Their new Eden was doomed.

When the colonists realized there was no hope in saving their dream of a new civilization, chaos broke out among the hundreds of thousands of people as they turned to their respective leaders for salvation. Those in leadership roles… either voted in by public opinion, volunteered at will, ascended through capitalism, or ordained by faith… now rise to the occasion as wartime leaders.

Massive Terraformers that once bent the landscape to their will have now been taken over by powerful organizations and converted into colony ship construction and launch platforms. These rival factions compete for information and resources across the dying planet as their last hope to escape off-world in the original Colony Ship plans that brought them there to begin with.

After society splintered, the information splintered with it. Each faction holds part of the module plans to build the colony ship but must retrieve the others to finish their build. Instead of working together, they now battle for resources and information. Workers and civilians are hastily trained in combat to protect the individual faction bases from each other while still performing their regular job duties. Soldiers are tasked with capturing enemies with the knowledge of providing blueprints for the construction of the colony ship modules.

Once the leaders obtain the blueprints and construct their colony ship, they must launch it before the impending destruction of their homeworld. The immense energy exerted from a single colony ship launch will likely doom the rest. Which faction will gain the resources necessary to escape first?