The story behind Settlers of Mars
An open, remixable educational project that teaches space biology, biotechnology, and aerospace engineering through play.
What it is
Settlers of Mars is a choose-your-own-adventure that merges the strategic resource-management of Settlers of Catan, the collaborative storytelling of Dungeons & Dragons, and the survival-sim loop of SimCity / Civilization. It exists in three forms that share one world:
- A browser colony sim — the Lunar & Martian Frontier — playable instantly online.
- An AI-guided tabletop role-play — any chatbot becomes your "Space Wizard" Dungeon Master.
- A 3D-printable physical board — download, print, paint, and play.
The point is to fill the gap left by formal science education: the informal, hands-on, team-based skills that make real space research work. Every mechanic maps to a genuine challenge of living on another world.
Origin
The game began as a student prototype in the Insight Wisconsin inventors' club, built by a team that wanted to know whether a board game could teach the science of planetary settlement. It has since grown 3D-printable pieces, AI-generated boards, five levels of AI Dungeon-Master prompts, and a full browser sim.
Credits
Created by Dr Richard Barker on behalf of The Collaborative Science Environment (cosecloud.com), building on the original Insight Wisconsin inventors'-club prototype. The browser colony sim (Lunar & Martian Frontier) is a companion project. Inspired by Klaus Teuber's Settlers of Catan and by NASA's open-science community.
License
The creative content — game designs, artwork, 3D models, text, and prompts — is released under CC BY 4.0. You're free to share and adapt it for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you give credit. Any source code is additionally available under the MIT License. See LICENSE.
How to cite
Barker, R. (2024). Settlers of Mars & D&D Role Player Adventure: The Gateway to Space Science Mastery [educational game]. The Collaborative Science Environment. https://github.com/dr-richard-barker/Settlers_of_Mars_3D_LLM
Machine-readable metadata lives in CITATION.cff and .zenodo.json for a versioned, DOI-minted Zenodo archive.
Roadmap & ideas
The living to-do list lives in the repo's README. A snapshot:
| Status | Item |
|---|---|
| Done | Browser colony sim live; STL files; AI Dungeon-Master prompts (5 levels); example boards |
| In progress | This GitHub Pages hub; Zenodo-ready metadata & license |
| Idea | Printable rulebook PDF; classroom lesson plans; a shared gallery of player-made boards & stories |
| Idea | Deeper space-biology tie-ins (GeneLab/OSDR datasets as in-game "discoveries") |
Have an idea or a board to share? Open an issue or a pull request.