Cats and dogs go to space in adorable Fluffy Frontier board game
One giant leap for kitten-kind.
Play as adorable cats and dogs in space in the upcoming board game Fluffy Frontier.
In Fluffy Frontier, the seemingly ordinary pets that occupy peoples’ homes lead double-lives as secret aliens running space agencies under the noses of their owners. As these undercover alien agents, players will be attempting to complete various experiments and missions across a space-station – based on a comet - without their owners clocking-on. The pets will be looking to perform their many tasks before the comet reaches the atmosphere of the sun and burns to nothing.
Having embarked on an apparently man-made missions to Halley’s Comet in 2061, the player animals will be planning and carrying out their strategies without the human astronaut’s knowledge. At the start of the upcoming game, the first player lays a new site card next to the existing one on the table, thereby connecting the two sites together. Each player’s round sees them configuring a program of actions for their pet to perform, with every action taking place in a set order during their turn. The active player can also put resources towards performing actions.
When moving, players select which square they want to move to and flip any un-discovered chits placed there. Depending on the chit, players can collect resources to put towards their future experiments. Performing experiments will reward players with the victory points they need to win the game, with every experiment requiring a certain amount of resources – and particular die result – to be completed. The more resource-costly experiments will net players a greater number of victory points, with the player holding the most victory points by the end of the game being named the winner.
Each of the playable animals in Fluffy Frontier are based on various real-life pets that have been set into space including Felicette the cat – who become the first pet cat to visit space in 1963 – Shan Shan the puppy who was sent on a mission to collect data for human travel and even a squirrel monkey called Gordo, who set the record in 1957 for travelling the farthest in a human rocket.
Fluffy Frontier was developed and is set to be published by Ion Game Design, a studio that has previously created and released other space board games such Stationfall – a traitor-style tabletop title about a group of crewmembers attempting to survive a disastrous event – and an exploration game called Dawn on Titan.
The Kickstarter campaign for Fluffy Frontier is live until June 27th, with a pledge of €49 (£42/$52) getting backers a copy of the core game in March 2023.