Game buried in desert, to launch after 2,700 years

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Jason Rohrer is well-known in indie gaming circles for his experimental "art games" like Passage and Sleep is Death, but his latest creation is something that may not be played by anyone alive today. Rohrer's latest creation, a board game titled A Game for Someone, is currently buried somewhere in a Nevada desert where Rohrer intends it to stay for the next 2,700 years.

"I wanted to make a game that is not for right now, that I will never play," said Rohrer onstage at this year's Game Developers Conference, "and nobody now living would ever play."

Polygon reports that the game was created as a (very literal) response to a "humanity's last game" themed challenge at GDC. Rohrer created the rules for the game and playtested it with a computer to account for balance issues, and then set about building it using materials that would last for a few thousand years—the board and its pieces are crafted from titanium, and the rules are written on acid-free paper stored in a hermetically sealed glass tube.

Rohrer buried the game on public land in the Nevada desert. He didn't commit the exact coordinates to memory, but he recorded them and obscured that data with over a million "false" GPS coordinates, which he printed out in sets of 900 and passed out to GDC attendees at his talk. Among these coordinates is the precise location of A Game for Someone's burial. At a search rate of one set of coordinates a day, Rohrer said, the game should be located at some point in the next 2,700 years.

Or sooner, maybe. Polygon notes that people were gathering the GPS coordinates after the talk in the hopes of organizing the data and working through it a bit more quickly than the one-a-day pace suggested by Rohrer. Expect our full review of A Game for Someone to go up at some point in the next millennium or so.

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