You wake up on a damaged spaceship and discover it’s the year 2360. You have no idea where you are or how you got here. What do you do?
If you’re feeling a little flustered at this point, don’t be. The ship’s onboard AI soon offers guidance: “Tap to collect energy. You need energy to repair your ship.”
You oblige and start tapping away at the screen. Before long, you’ve collected enough energy to repair your solar-powered module and the engines kick to life.
As you try to figure out how to get back to Earth, that AI chimes in again: “Plant some potatoes! Then use potatoes to make probes. This way we can collect data and figure out what’s going on.”
Um, OK.
The voice continues, “These launched potato probes can increase a star’s mass. Theoretically, we could shoot them toward a star, force it to implode, and use it to travel back in time.”
That’s the story line behind the stellar clicker Spaceplan, a game inspired by astrophysics and other scientific concepts such as black holes, alternate realities, and the correlation between mass and velocity.
Or loosely inspired, we should say. As developer Jake Hollands puts it, the game is based on “a total misunderstanding of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.”
Jake’s modesty aside, Spaceplan does manage to explain complex principles of quantum mechanics (using potatoes, no less), so even players with no knowledge of physics can wrap their heads around the concepts.
Whether you seek to unravel the mysteries of time travel or simply want to kill a few minutes, Spaceplan is a solid choice. One tip: Don’t be scared off by the control panel that appears at the start. Keep tapping and you’ll soon see a brand-new world unfold before you.