It’s the early 1980s. You and your siblings are obsessed with Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Space: 1999, Star Wars, Doctor Who, Buck Rogers and any other fantastic space adventure available on TV or VHS.

A decade before you’ll see your first personal computer, you still want to recreate those epic space battles. Over the course of a weekend, you create a multiplayer pencil and paper game that is competitive, skills-based, tactical and exciting.

Space Clash is born.

Your friends love it. Over the years to come, you will encounter kids from other schools whom you’ve never met, but who play the game you made. No internet, no Facebook, just word of mouth and simple, compelling gameplay.

~

Thirty years later, you start absentmindedly doodling a game of Space Clash on a napkin at a restaurant. Your kids, now space fans themselves, ask what it is. This is how you played games before PCs and Steam and Oculus Rift, you explain. They are entranced.

They play it with you. They take it to their own school and play it with their friends. Their phones sit in their bags as they huddle around a sheet of paper, contesting a battle in a faraway asteroid field.

How awesome could this game be on a tablet? Combining the magic of the pencil and paper game, including shared-device turn-based multiplayer to preserve face to face interaction, with all the experience-enhancing possibilities of a modern game engine.

We asked that question, and then we set out to discover the answer.