Ever wonder where game designers get their ideas?  It's different for every designer and game, but here's the story behind Countdown To Blastoff.

One evening late in 2007, as I was relaxing before bedtime, I tried to think of simple card game mechanics that I might build a game around.  The notion occurred to me of playing a sequence of numbered cards, each one higher than the card before.  It didn’t seem terribly promising to me at the time, nor was the idea particularly original, so I discarded the notion (no pun intended).

Just a week later, the idea popped into my head again, and I realized that playing downward – to zero – could be interesting.  It also suggested a theme: counting down to blast a rocket into space.  But I perceived some potential difficulties.  Would you always have to begin with the same number?   (And if not, why wouldn’t you simply start with a low number to shorten the countdown?)  Also, with many different numbered cards in the deck, it seemed likely that you’d often get stuck and spend lots of time discarding, hoping to draw a card to continue your countdown.  The problems with the idea seemed considerable, so again I turned my thoughts to other things.

Surprisingly, the very next night, the same notion of a counting-down card game returned to me.  This time, I took it more seriously.  This seemed to be a game that was trying to will its way into existence!  So I tried to solve some of the problems that I'd identified the previous evening.   And before I fell asleep, I had worked up the scoring system (only the player who reaches zero scores points, and the number of points is greater the higher the number you start with).  I also came up with a scheme for continuing a countdown even when you don’t have the right number in your hand ('Solution' wild cards and 'Quick Fix' penalty cards).

The next morning, I created a deck of paper cards and cut them out, then had a successful playtest that afternoon with my dad and my sister Misty.  Countdown To Blastoff was born!  {read less}