Event Horizon
Quaker Meeting House, Reading, 29th April 2023
Designed by Johan Soh Olofsson
The game takes place in the year 2047. The Event Horizon, a state of the art space ship designed to reach deep space, went missing for 7 years. Now it’s back. Nobody knows where it has been. A UN led fleet on a search and salvage mission are approaching the ship. You will play as a crewmember on this fleet taking the role of a commander or a specialist of different varieties.
The game takes place on the ships in the fleet and on the Event Horizon where players will move and interact with the environment and each other. The game is one of exploration, resource management and political agendas. There are elements of combat and violence in the game.
Event Horizon is a megagame with lighter board game mechanics and prominent elements of negotiation and roleplaying in a near future, space horror setting. The game is played across two rooms where the first room holds the fleet and the second room holds the Event Horizon. The game has severely restricted communication between rooms, and the claustrophobic setting leaves little room for the “grand scale of things” as each player is ultimately left alone to face what lies in wait on the Event Horizon.
In the near future, humanity has successfully colonized the Moon and Mars, and is venturing deeper into space. In the year 2040, state-of-the-art star ship the Event Horizon was sent on a secret mission, but it disappeared without a trace beyond the planet Neptune at the outer rim of the solar system. The official story was that her engines malfunctioned resulting in a loss that was considered the worst space disaster on record, with her entire 36-person crew missing and presumed dead in a cloud of fiery death. The economic ripples of the disaster disrupted the stability on Earth as the blame was passed around. In 2047, just as all-out war is about erupt, the ship suddenly reappears.
The international UN space station for the outer planets picked up a heavily distorted distress signal which identified the ship as the lost Event Horizon. The signal has been verified through blackwater security protocols. Since the ship had all the major players on Earth involved in its development, they call on their best vessels in reach of the outer planets to be diverted to take on this UN-led top-secret search and salvage mission.
The Earth’s future is at stake.
On board the fleet are security personnel, scientists, medical staff, technicians and high-ranking officers who command each ship.
The game takes its name from one of the horizons surrounding a black hole, an outer edge of a point of no return – a region in spacetime beyond which future events no longer can be influenced. It will be a race against the clock for the teams to meet their competing objectives as individual crewmembers start to lose the grip on reality.