Team project
Space Boss 2026
Space Boss is a mixed-media wargame for space logistics planning, developed in an STTR Phase I collaboration between Technergetics, RIT, the U.S. Space Force and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Luke Whited worked on it as a member of the RIT development team.
What I did
Role: Member of the RIT development team
- Designed the game state the GameMaster tracks, covering the board and each player’s choices.
- Designed how the GameMaster responds to player decisions and predicts where players are heading.
- Set its limits: it plays fair, does not always take its strongest move, and acts only on information it could reasonably know at that point in the game.
Details
- Client
- Technergetics LLC
- Partners
- Rochester Institute of Technology, U.S. Space Force, Air Force Research Laboratory
- Program
- STTR Phase I (Small Business Technology Transfer)
- Role
- Member of the RIT development team
- Year
- 2026
- Tags
- Tabletop / Wargame / Simulation
Space Boss is a mixed-media wargame for space logistics planning. Players work around a physical board while a GameMaster system runs the simulation.
Personal contributions
- Designed the game state the GameMaster tracks, covering the board and each player’s choices.
- Designed how the GameMaster responds to player decisions and predicts where players are heading.
- Set its limits: it plays fair, does not always take its strongest move, and acts only on information it could reasonably know at that point in the game.
- Worked with the rest of the team on the tile-based maps, unit movement and game sheets, the scenario and mission logic, and the facilitator tools used to plan and run sessions.
Designing for a client
Unlike my own projects, Space Boss had a client with defined objectives and deliverables: a wargame that helps planners work through space logistics before launch. The hard part was the GameMaster. It had to know the game state, react to players and anticipate their moves without becoming an opponent nobody could beat.
