COUNTDOWN TO BLASTOFF, GAME DEVELOPMENT #3
T-minus 19 Years: The Timeline Of Countdown To Blastoff (August 29th, 2026 – Jeff)
Countdown To Blastoff has a long history. People sometimes ask me about it, so I’ve chronicled it here, and hope you will find it interesting.
December, 2006. The idea for Countdown To Blastoff was conceived over a period of a week. (I wrote about it here.) I then created a primitive prototype, and a successful first playtest was conducted that afternoon! The game’s original title was simply ‘Countdown’.
2007 – 2009. Countdown To Blastoff was played as a family game, and sometimes with friends.
March 7, 2009. The first blindtest of Countdown To Blastoff was conducted with friends Tony Castaneda, Tom Fink, and Max Brown. They shared with me a number of very helpful comments. It seemed that the game wasn't far from publishable form...
2010 – 2022. Life intervened. My plans to form a game company were put on hold until I retired.
December 2022. I retired from teaching and started revisiting a number of old game designs.
January, 2023. Joshua redesigned the cards to make them more functional and much more visually appealing! (You can see some of them here.
June, 2023. We received interesting feedback from the UnPub at Origins Game Fair. Eventually, this led to the creation of two expansion games that are more ‘strategy’ than ‘family' games – and we hope to publish them in the future!
June, 2024. A game publisher (Tim Densham at Catastrophe Games) expressed interest in publishing Countdown To Blastoff; we were flattered and encouraged by this, but upon consideration, we decided to stay the course and publish the game ourselves.
October 2024. We held our first public playtest on the 'Break My Game' server on Discord.
April 2025. The first professional prototype of Countdown To Blastoff was produced. This led to a new round of playtesting – and some tweaks to the game design.
April – August 2026. We threw ourselves into creating a Kickstarter project for Countdown To Blastoff, which includes this promotional video.
September 1st, 2026. Countdown To Blastoff launches on Kickstarter!