Shackleton Base – Fabio Lopiano’s Designer Diary

This designer diary originally appeared on BoardGameGeek. Thanks to Fabio Lopiano for this work around this creative process which gave birth to Shackleton Base!

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Half a century after the Apollo missions, humanity is ready to return to the Moon — not just to visit, but to stay.

In Shackleton Base: A Journey to the Moon, you will lead your space agency in establishing a permanent base on the lunar surface. Although players compete, they are all contributing to the construction and success of the same base.

This journey began in February 2022 as Nestore Mangone and I were finalizing the last few details for our previous game, Autobahn. We decided it was time to start working on a new project, and during a brainstorming session, we explored various ideas and discovered that both of us were drawn to the concept of building a base on the Moon.

We aimed for a game grounded more in reality than fiction, and we looked at the Artemis Program for inspiration. The Artemis Accords define an international collaboration involving NASA, ESA, and several other space agencies, with the goal of establishing a permanent base on the Moon.

This base is planned to be built inside the Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s south pole. The crater, over four kilometers deep, has a bottom that remains in constant darkness, resulting in very low but stable temperatures. It also contains ice, making water access feasible. Conversely, the crater’s edge is continuously exposed to sunlight, making it an ideal location for solar panels to provide energy for the base.

The more we read about the Artemis Program, the more ideas we generated for elements to incorporate into the game.

Key Ideas in the Game

One aspect that sets the Artemis Program apart from the Apollo missions is the significant involvement of private corporations alongside space agencies. This collaboration is a central theme in Shackleton Base.

The main idea of the game is that while each player takes on the role of a leading space agency, several private corporations are also participating in the program. Each corporation introduces its own deck of cards, a small board, a type of resource, special actions, and new scoring opportunities. In each game, players will choose three of seven available corporations, ensuring a diverse and dynamic gameplay experience.

This set-up required us to build a solid foundation for the game so that it functions smoothly regardless of the corporation combinations in play. This was particularly challenging because each corporation has a distinct character and focuses on different mechanisms; some are about area majority, others about set collection, contract fulfillment, or engine building. Our goal was to create a foundational rule set that integrates these varying mechanisms seamlessly without overly complicated rules.

To achieve this, we designed the core game with simplicity in mind. The foundational rules are straightforward, while each corporation has a separate rules sheet that includes components, set-up, scoring, and a list of all the cards.

The folks at Sorry We Are French did an excellent job organizing the game box so that each corporation has its own small box with all necessary cards, tokens, and components, thus making set-up simple: select three corporations, take their sideboards, boxes, and rule sheets, and you’re ready to play.

Main Mechanisms in Shackleton Base

At its core, Shackleton Base is a worker placement game with a few twists. The game features three types of astronauts, which are not necessarily tied to a specific player.

The game is played in three rounds. Each round starts with a shuttle phase in which a starship arrives from Earth and docks at the Lunar Gateway, which orbits the Moon. Players then draft shuttles with six astronauts to deploy on the base during the action phase. Astronauts not picked remain at the Lunar Gateway and may come into play in the next phase. Each drafted shuttle also provides resources and credits, as well as determining the turn order for the subsequent action phase.

In the action phase, players deploy one astronaut at a time to perform actions. Astronauts can be sent to the crater to collect resources or to the mission control area, where they build structures, fund corporate projects, or perform corporation-specific actions.

Each slot along the crater points to a row of sectors, and the astronaut, depending on their type, will collect resources from those sectors, provided there is at least one structure in it, regardless of which player built it.

After the action phase is a maintenance phase. Astronauts who were deployed in the mission control area will go back to Earth, while astronauts who were deployed around the crater will go to activate players’ buildings, according to which player has built the most in the row of sectors the astronaut is pointing to.

This aspect is key to the game and worth elaborating on: Each player places buildings from their player board into the crater. The freed space on their player board has room for a number of astronauts, and when an astronaut is placed there, it enables various abilities, income, or endgame scoring conditions. As players place their buildings in the crater, they aim to control rows and deploy astronauts to those rows to gain them at the end of the round and activate their buildings. However, astronauts gained at the end of a round stay in the buildings and won’t be available for placement in subsequent turns, adding an engine-building aspect to the game.

The three kinds of astronauts interact with different aspects of the game. Engineers (yellow) focus on building structures and collecting building materials. Technicians (red) are geared toward funding projects from corporations — each project being a card with special abilities players can acquire — and collecting funds. Scientists (blue) are about interacting with the corporations, collecting special resources, and using them for corporation-specific actions. Although any astronaut type can perform any type of action at the Mission Control center, using the appropriate type grants a bonus.

Utilizing blue astronauts to collect special resources and perform corporation actions allows seamless integration of various corporations into the game. Each corporation has resource tokens placed in the crater during the game, with the first token placed during set-up. When scientists collect resources, they activate one token per sector, letting the player gain different resources tied to that corporation. Players then use these special resources when performing corporation actions, either by activating a specific action space in the mission control center or as a bonus when performing other actions.

It took quite a while to refine these mechanisms. When we started, we didn’t expect the game to evolve this way, but through constant iteration and testing, we found the right balance.

The Corporations

As we were iterating the main rule set, we were also developing several corporations, each one adding a different flavor to the game.

Moon Mining

Moon Mining is one of the first corporations we introduced, and it is about mining resources on the Moon and shipping them back to Earth. This corporation was present from the beginning, even before we decided to split some features of the game out into separate corporations, with its cargo ship printed on the main board.

This is one of the easiest corporations to play with, and we suggest it for the first game.

This corporation’s special resource is Helium 3, which players gather from the main board (when triggering this corporation’s discs). As a corporation action, players can then spend Helium 3, Rare Earth Metals, or combinations of the two in order to get boons. Each combination takes a slot on the corporation spaceship, which will leave at the end of each round to return empty for the next round.

The rewards are mostly victory points and credits, with a couple of slots providing even better rewards like getting a free project card or placing a free building on the board.

Projects from this corporation make you more efficient at mining and shipping, like this one for example:

Fun fact: Due to the Moon’s low gravity and lack of atmosphere, a Mass Driver can « shoot » cargo from the Moon directly into Earth’s orbit

Selenium Research

This corporation is also easy to play with. It is about collecting samples from the Moon surface and using them to run experiments, which in turn yield various boons.

Each special resource disc from this corporation yields a couple of different types of samples. As a corporation action, you may then return a specific combination of samples to fulfill one of the three requests on a display. Each round these requests require more samples but award better rewards. We suggest playing with this corporation in the first game as it provides an easy way to obtain resources or other boons (by trading in combinations of samples).

Projects from this corporation make you more efficient at collecting and using samples, but also provide alternative uses for them, like this one:

With this card, for each sample of this type you own, you get a discount of one credit when funding any project

Artemis Tours

Working on this corporation was a lot of fun. The idea is that this is a tour operator bringing tourists to the Moon.

When activating its discs, players gain tourists, which initially just stand in the way, occupying their buildings without actually activating their abilities, but at the end of each round, tourists return home, granting victory points to the players who hosted them. (The fewer tourists that visit the Moon that round, the more points each tourist awards.) Most of the projects from this corporation are tourist attractions, so once you get a couple of them, you now have places to put these tourists so that they give you benefits rather than standing in the way.

The Apollo 11 Museum can receive up to three tourists per round, granting you VPs. Moreover every time you fund a project from another corporation, a new tourist will automatically visit your base.

Evergreen Farms

This corporation is about growing plants on the Moon. This went through several iterations before we got it right, and now it’s a bit trickier to play with, so we suggest playing with this corporation no earlier than your second game.

The special resources of this corporation are plants that players can then spend to place farms in the crater. These farms take the place of a regular building and can be placed on a sector where the current player already has one of their buildings. These farms are neutral (i.e. they are not owned by the player who places them), and at the end of each round, when astronauts along the border are assigned to the player with the biggest structures along the row, any farm in the same row grants extra victory points.

Thus, this corporation makes the competition for controlling rows more fierce. Moreover, the bigger farms are the ones that award more points, but they are also harder to control (since you can’t have a large building in the same sector).

This project boosts your reputation when you build farms

Sky Watch

This corporation came in a bit later, and it is about defending the base from incoming asteroids or other meteors hitting the surface. It adds a semi-cooperative aspect to the game as players work together to deflect an asteroid that will otherwise hit the base at the end of the game.

These meteors contribute resources to a program which has a few milestones: The first one will reveal the general area of the crater that will be hit, the second one will reduce the impact (the asteroid will destroy only structures in the hit sector and not also in the adjacent sectors), and the final step will deflect the asteroid so that it hits outside the crater. Of course some players might just steer clear of the impact area and watch their opponents’ buildings burn once the asteroid hits. On the other hand, contributing to the program will reward players with increasing amounts of VPs, so sometimes it is still worth helping out anyway.

We suggest trying this corporation on your second game.

Contributing to the Sky Watch programs costs credits and resources, and this project provides a discount of one titanium

Space Robotics

This was another fun corporation to design around. Robots are the special resource provided by this corporation. These can be used to power some engine-building tiles that can be acquired via the corporation action (mostly costing resources and providing discounts, income or endgame VPs). Designing project cards for this corporation was fun as they mostly provide additional corporation actions that let you spend robots to do other tasks.

With this project, you may spend a robot to build a size-one structure as a corporation action

To Mars

While this is the last corporation included in the game, it’s built around an idea present in the first version of the game, that of building a spaceship to launch towards Mars.

We suggest playing with this corporation only on your third game when you are familiar enough with the game’s mechanisms because it requires some experience in order to play well with it. The main idea is that at some point players will begin to dismantle some of the structures they’ve built in the crater in order to attach them to the Mars ship that is being built. (The idea is that once the ship lands on Mars, it will already have several working modules from the get-go.) The Mars ship has three main sections, each requiring a different number of modules, with some majority score being awarded at the end of the game, but each section will score only if completed.

Moreover, astronauts retrieved at the end of each round may be assigned to the Mars ship to gain even more VPs, so timing is essential. If you begin to dismantle your base too soon, you will lose important majorities on the Moon at the end of each round, but if you do it too late, you won’t get the majorities on the Mars ship.

When you fund this project, you may immediately build a structure. Moreover, from now on, you can build structures directly on the Mars ship.

Other Corporations

We had a few other corporations to play with and lots of ideas for new ones, but if we included them all in the box, the game would have become way too expensive, so we had to choose what to keep and what to save for later.

We think that the ones included fit with each other in enough different ways to provide a new experience every time. Hopefully, if the game is well received, we will be able to put a few other ones in a separate expansion box.

How It Started

Both Nestore and I are full-time game designers, dedicating most of our time to developing board games. Given that we live in different cities, we rely heavily on Tabletop Simulator for rapid prototyping, testing online several times a week. We create physical prototypes only for live test sessions, which occur a few times a month depending on our schedules.

Initially, our game existed solely in digital form. One of our key ideas in the first few iterations was combining worker placement with a card-driven game. Players had basic worker-placement slots on their player boards for actions like building structures or gaining cards, but the more interesting actions were on cards representing structures built on the Moon.

Each card represented a structure to build in the crater, offering improved actions for astronauts (with bonuses for using a specific type). These cards were laid out in the crater, connecting to their neighbors, creating a network of buildings.

However, this approach had its challenges. The random order of the cards meant that some actions could become available too late — or not at all. This issue was exacerbated by our desire to include thematic activities such as building greenhouses, extracting minerals, or constructing a spaceship to Mars.

Early Iterations and Challenges

We went through several iterations, trying different approaches. One of the early versions featured four separate card markets for each type of action, along with various tracks.

One thing that stuck across all versions of the game was the idea that the solar panels were built around the edge of the crater and that the energy they provided was a shared resource, usable by all players.

After some time, we decided to rethink our approach. In April 2022, we attended IdeaG, the big Italian game designer meet-up in Parma, where we worked face-to-face and had a breakthrough. We moved away from the « cards as buildings » idea to placing actual buildings on the board, with workers activating rows of buildings. Each type of building would then provide a different ability when triggered.

It was here that we also decided to split the several activities players could pursue into separate corporations, then pick only a few of them per play.

Protoyping and Refinement

In June 2022, Nestore and I met in Rome for another development push. We tested the first physical version of the prototype with other game designers in the city, receiving valuable feedback and making quick adjustments. I traveled all over Italy, bringing the prototype to designer meet-ups and trying the game with different people.

Let’s look at some of the stages we went through within a few months:

This was one of the first physical prototypes in a meet-up in Ravenna at the end of June.

At that time, the action selection worked like this: You placed a meeple around the crater, performed a few actions according to the type of meeple and type of buildings along the row, then activated one of your buildings on that row; depending on its size you took an action:

• Size 1 buildings let you build another building.
• Size 2 buildings let you buy a card from one of the corporation decks.
• Size 3 buildings let you activate cards or other special abilities you had already acquired.

The three neutral buildings printed on the board can be activated by anyone.

Each sector could have up to three different buildings (of different sizes 1/2/3 and from different players) or the headquarters (a single building that occupied the whole sector). In order to build in a sector, the sector must be powered, i.e., there must be a solar panel allocated to it. As a free action during your turn, you can build a panel, which also provides energy to the base. (Energy can then be spent when funding projects.) As a result, there’s this little positive interaction such that you may build a panel to power a new sector for your structure, but by so doing you provide energy for the other players to use in their projects, or you can build a panel to provide energy for your project, but by doing so you open up another sector for the other players’ structures. This idea has pretty much survived until the published version.

This was taken in Mantua, in mid July. Here the worker slots have been spread all around the crater (while the previous version had double slots on one side only). This allows players to have finer control over who gains the meeple at the end of the round. (In case of a tie, the player with the closer, bigger building does, so now two different players may take home the meeples at the two ends of the same row.) Note also how, at this point, the four corporation decks were still shuffled together and cards were bought from a common market.

In August, I brought the game to GiocAosta, a wonderful small con in the Alps. Here we kept the corporation decks separate. Now each corporation has two cards on display and a small worker placement area next to it where players place their astronauts to either get a card or build a structure.

At this point, players were consistently having fun, but the game was still a bit clunky. For example, each corporation had a couple of rule cards on the board explaining how players could interact with them. (These rules would be incorporated into the base rules a bit later.)

This picture was from a playtesting event in Milan in September. At this point, the rules were a bit smoother. Each corporation had its little blue discs that were added to the board as more structures were built, structures that provided the special resources. These resources were then used to interact with the corporation’s special actions.

The turn structure was still slightly different from now: On your turn, you performed one main action (by placing an astronaut on a slot) and up to two secondary actions, which depended on the corporation in play and mostly required those corporation resources.

Streamlining this idea was one of the most challenging parts in the game development, and it would take several months to get right.

Another issue with the current iteration was that each player started with one of the corporation’s projects and a special ability tied to that corporation that was triggered when they built their headquarters. Although this looked like a good idea at a time — providing some direction at the start of the game — it turned out to be a major problem because this set-up created an attachment between each player and « their » corporation, so they ended up playing mostly with that corporation, ignoring the other three.

What we wanted instead was for players to explore the possible interactions across different corporations and find creative ways to make them work together, so the next thing we changed was to introduce four space agencies which represent four partners of the Artemis program: NASA, ESA, JAXA, and CSA.

Each player now takes the role of an agency leader, each with a special ability, a one-off bonus when they build their headquarters, and an objective to complete by the end of the game — and each player will work with all of the corporations without feeling a particular attachment to one of them.

By the end of October, we now had several corporations — I think eight or nine at that point — and we were testing various combinations, tweaking them here and there.

Meeting with Sorry We Are French

We didn’t feel the game was ready for prime time yet, so I didn’t bring it to SPIEL ’22 for pitching. But by the end of the year, we did more tweaks, and after several playtests we decided that we were ready to start showing it to publishers.

We sent emails and organized a few remote pitches, playing it on TTS with publishers and getting some encouraging feedback.

In February 2023, I went for the first time to the Festival International des Jeux in Cannes. I booked a table at the OFF (a huge playtesting event taking place every night after the fair closes), and the week before the event I sent an email to a couple of French publishers with a sell sheet and a link to the rules, just in case they still had a slot for an appointment.

I got a reply from Matthieu Verdier, developer for Sorry We Are French, who said that while he was on the train to Cannes, he read the rulebook and was impressed by the game and wanted to meet me at the fair.

It was a relatively quick meeting with Matthieu and Emmanuel, and they were enthusiastic about the game, both about the setting and about the idea of having all these different possible combinations of corporations to play with.

It was also a great timing because they were just closing their next big box game (Zhanguo: The First Empire), and they were eager to start development on a new one to be released at SPIEL Essen 24. (This was way sooner than we expected as other publishers we talked to about the game would consider it only in the 2025-2027 time frame.)

I said that, sure, we were interested, and that I would of course consult with Nestore before signing a deal. We also talked with Marco and Stefania, designers of Zhanguo: The First Empire, who told us that working with the team at SWAF was a delight, and they really encouraged us to sign with them.

Within a couple of weeks of the meeting, we signed a publishing deal and by early April 2023 we started to work on game development with Matthieu.

Considering that Shackleton Base is a fairly big game, twelve months from initial idea to contract signature might seem quick, but in those months we probably spent more than a thousand hours working on the game…and we still had another thousand-plus hours to go during development.

Game Development

Starting in April, we had a regular weekly meeting on TTS with Matthieu, where we played a three-player game. Nestore and I would then spend the other days of the week tweaking the game here and there, often testing again, sometimes with other friends, while also bringing the game to various conventions and playtesting events until everything worked smoothly.

A few major changes happened during this time. One is that we dropped the number of corporations in play from four to three. This reduced the cognitive load of having to deal with too many cards and mechanisms while keeping several strategic avenues open.

Secondary Actions and Corporation Actions

One main problem we had to tackle, which took several iterations, was the actual turn structure.

Up to that point, during the action phase on your turn you deployed an astronaut, then you could do up to two secondary actions, i.e. corporation actions. This was necessary in order to interact with the corporations as each corporation has one or more corporation action types to interact with it — but it was problematic because you couldn’t do one or two such actions on every turn. Actually, in the first few turns of the game and until you collected enough special resources, you didn’t have any secondary actions available to you!

Our idea was that if you had special resources, you might want to use them with a secondary action, but if you didn’t, you could just do your main action and move on…but what happened, especially with new players, was that each player would do their main action, then they would check whether they could do any secondary action, so they would go through each corporation and say, « No, I can’t do this, let’s try the next », and so on and spend most of their turn trying not to « waste » their secondary action until they gave up and passed. This made the game twice as long as it was supposed to be.

We tried several approaches until we found a solution that also fixed a couple of other issues with the action selection. When a solution fixes several problems, it’s usually a really good one…

One issue was that the two main actions to build a structure and fund a project were spread across the three corporations, i.e., for each corporation we had four slots for funding projects and four slots for building structures. When building a structure with a given corporation, you also gained a special resource from that corporation from the sector where you built it. (If that sector didn’t produce that resource yet, you would place a corporation disc in there, making it now produce it.) This was clunky because sometimes the corporation with available action slots didn’t have sectors where you could build and get a resource, and in general matching a build action to a specific corporation wasn’t particularly intuitive. (The reason it was like that was that as you place more discs from a corporation, the cost of funding its projects goes up.)

Moreover, having four slots regardless of the number of players made the two-player game too loose, but reducing the set-up to one slot per player per corporation was too drastic.

Also, having to use specific color meeples for the two actions made the game too tight and drafting the wrong shuttle card at the start of the turn could have dire consequences if you ended up with the wrong color meeple on the last turn.

Anyway, we solved all of these issues by introducing a separate area for the action selection — the mission control center — with three rows of slots: one for building structures, one for funding projects, and one for performing three corporation actions. This improved the game a lot because you could place any color meeple on any row, but you get a bonus if you use the right type of astronaut.

If you build with an engineer, you can activate a special token from the sector where you build. (You can choose which corporation token to activate, and if that is not present in the sector, you can add it before activating it.)

If you fund a project with a technician, you also get to do a corporation action.

If you are ready to do more corporation actions, you just place a meeple in the bottom row to perform three of them — and if it’s a blue meeple, you also gain an astronaut from the lunar gateway to place in one of your buildings.

With this change, we eliminated the « up to two corporation actions » aspect of a player’s turn, and your turn simply became: Deploy one astronaut.

Of course this tweak required lots of other changes in order to maintain a consistent number of actions throughout the game, e.g., we had to change the number of astronauts to draft every turn. (Originally we had 6/5/4, but we changed it to six per round.) Moreover, we could now change the number of action slots available in the control center area depending on the number of players.

We had a couple other major changes in the first few months of development.

Mission Objectives

Up to that point, at the start of the game each player drafted a « leader » card that gave them a special ability and a mission. Players would then get bonus points for completing their mission, depending on how quickly they achieved it.

At the beginning of June, I ran a few playtests at UK Games Expo, and one of the players suggested tying the missions to the corporations in play so that players would race to complete common objectives rather than private ones. That was a great idea because by adding corporation-specific objectives, we pushed players to interact with all corporations instead of choosing one or two to work with and ignoring the rest.

This was an issue that we had already tried to tackle, unsuccessfully, by providing incentives to work with different corporations, such as rewarding diversity in corporation cards, awarding tokens when doing a corporation action for the first time, etc. — but all of those attempts were clunky and added unnecessary rules.

By moving the missions from the leader to the corporation, we shifted the focus from a player’s leader to the three corporations in play.

For each corporation, we introduced a three-layered mission (from easy to hard), and each player has three tokens that they can use to claim one objective from each corporation. They can choose whether to settle for the easy mission or try for the harder ones, but they are now strongly incentivized to at least engage with all of them.

This also provides clear directions at the start of the game as players decide in which order to tackle the three different missions.

Reputation Track

The last major change was done around August when we introduced the reputation track.

We had a few balancing issues here and there, and once again we managed to address a bunch of different issues with a single change. You gain reputation mostly when you build a solar panel (or better, when you make more energy available), and you lose reputation mostly if you can’t pay maintenance for your buildings at the end of the round. As you go up the reputation track, you access extra corporation actions. (At the start, your only available action on the track is gaining 2 reputation, but as you go up, you gain access to actions to gain better resources.)

This solved the issue of you doing a corporation action as a bonus, but not having special resources to spend — and since we now had this track, we could add other things to it, such as scoring extra points when claiming a corporation goal, Now, depending on where you are on the track, you arn 1-4 additional points when claiming that goal. This adds more tension because even if you reach the requisites to claim the highest value goal, you might want to wait to get a few steps up the track before claiming it, risking that another player reaches the same goal and claims it ahead of you.

Final Tweaks

Besides these changes, we spent most of the year playing the various combinations of corporations, tweaking them, completely changing some, adding new ones, and shelving some that didn’t convince us too much. We decided on a set of seven corporations to put in the box (mostly to keep the game at a reasonable price), then we chose three suggested set-ups for the first few games in order to have a smooth first-game experience before dealing with the more challenging corporations in the following games.

We kept playing every week (with Matthieu regularly winning and Nestore and I competing for second place), while also bringing the game to meet-ups and conventions until, by the end of 2023, we were happy with the result.

In the meanwhile, David Sitbon had been at work illustrating the game. He did a great job giving each corporation a unique look and feel, while Ulric Maes managed to come up with clear iconography. I like how all the game rules are basically reported on the main board — each phase of the game, how each action works, final scoring, etc. — so you shouldn’t have to go back to the rulebook, even when it’s been a while since your previous play.

Once all of the rules and corporations were set, we then spent most of January 2024 working on the solo mode, while a first proof of the final game was printed to show at the Spielwarenmesse Toy Fair, then at the Cannes Festival.

When I went to Cannes this time, I was able to look at the almost final version of the game. (There were a few tweaks left, and the solo components were still missing.) I had fun demoing the game at Cannes, and later in the year, at UKGE, as well as in other small cons here and there.

Fabio Lopiano