ORB

By Ross Ulbricht

During the last extended lockdown, I got bored and made up a little turn-based pen-and-paper game called ORB. In it, you are the head of an interstellar corporation. You explore worlds; gather resources; manufacture materials, components and systems; and build farms, factories and space ships. It’s super geeky but also a lot of fun. There are fully functional commodity, currency and even stock markets.

While we were locked down, I let my cellmate and a guy one cell over alpha-test it. I would send a line to the neighbor and fish his turn back and forth under the cell doors in an envelope. Once we came off the lockdown, word got out and now dozens of other prisoners in my block want to play! I don’t have the time to process all those turns, so I am setting up a guy who is handy with a calculator and can follow the algorithm. Another is doing the art and design, and yet another is handling the copies for each turn. My fiancée is even lending a hand by sending formatted versions of the different pages and a hex grid for the galaxy map.

Everyone is excited for the beta test to begin.