Playing Spacehack at Maker Faire UK

This post is coming to you live from Maker Faire UK being held this weekend at the Life Science Centre here in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The co-ooperative social game Spaceteam is addictive. I was first introduced to it in the basement of a strange looking bar in the company of fast friends that weren’t embarrassed to be shouting “Toggle the discharging Clip-jawed Fluxtrunions!” at the top of their voices in public. We’ve moved on to playing Cards Against Humanity, mainly because the threat of dropping your phone while laughing too much isn’t something to be trifled with, that, and you’re less likely to be thrown out of the bar for playing it.

Which leads us to Spacehack—put together by the team at the York Hack Space—it’s an amazing, and lovingly recreated, physical version of Spaceteam, but with more knobs. Each Spacehack console is based around a Beaglebone Black, with all the consoles talking—via MQTT—back to a Raspberry Pi which co-ordinates the game play between the consoles.

I talked to Daniel Bailey from the York Hack Space about the Spacehack build.

The team have posted all the details of their amazing build on their website. As the original game makers might say,

Do you like pushing buttons and shouting at your friends? Do you like discharging Clip-jawed Fluxtrunions? If you answered yes, or no, then you might have what it takes to be on a Spaceteam!

which is pretty self explanatory really?