The Memory Bunker

A crew of neuralinked astronauts drifts through space, their bodies in stasis, their minds aware of only each other. The computer storing their identities has failed, and they are trying to hold on to their identities by building a memory bunker - a grouping of moments where the memories of their lives can be kept safe.

The Memory Bunker is a card game designed to explore the memories of others, and to negotiate the limits of our own. Players tell short stories about spaces in their lives, and slowly assemble a “bunker” of memories that they are trying to keep alive.

An early rendering of the setup.

The initial idea for the game came from the experience of my mother's struggle with dementia, and the ways that memories are in fact held by those around you, especially as they begin to fade. As someone who has experienced this in real life, I wanted to create a game that played off of that central dynamic of sharing and forgetting.

Early sketches revolved around a simple NSWE grid which would slowly become populated with items from a person’s memory. Players would connect these sheets with their own memories and then share them with the group.

With each successive round, though, certain items would begin to “fade”, and it would be up to the players who had been told about the memory to keep it alive.

The barn, transformed for the event.

To address the narrative frame issues, I experimented with different fantastic storyline ideas, which I then fed into DALLE-3, just to see what kinds of images were generated. This process soon took the shape of a space odyssey where the computer holding on to astronaut memories had broken down, and now the old method of sharing with the collective was their last hope of remembering, or being remembered.

As for the structure of the cards, I decided to force players to adopt a spoke structure, and push the memory cubes outward from a central “entrance”, which would prevent the problematic looping and overlapping issues that had cropped up during playtest.

The full rulebook can be downloaded here.

An early gameplay prototyping session.