Drone Home Board Game

Drone Home is a fast-paced family game where players race to launch their aliens down the ramps and land inside the drone. Watch out, though–there’s a delay once you make it in, so other players can knock you out! If you stay in, though, and the drone lifts off, you’re one step closer to winning.

The drone is a bit hard to control, so it’s best for older children or adults to play this with someone else who’s more skilled at controlling the drone. It’s easy to get the drone tangled up, so make sure you have someone who can help keep it steady before you launch! The instructions also recommend charging the drone before playing, so be sure to charge it ahead of time and have someone help assemble the game pieces.

Students learn engineering practices and practice balancing cost and weight against data return as they configure their drones, choosing the optimal suite of cameras, batteries, and sensors. They then iterate and improve their choices over a series of flights to maximize science data return.

Before playing, conduct one or more “test flights” with partial rules to gradually introduce the full set of game rules and allow students to become familiar with them. For the first test flight, eliminate the Flight Event Cards and the Science Event Cards to simplify the rules and reduce randomness.

After students have played a few test flights, lead a class discussion about what they learned from their experiences and what they plan to do differently on their next flight. If you allow students to configure their drones as they wished on the first flight, ask them to describe how they made their choices and what went well or poorly.

If you don’t let students choose the equipment they use, assign them to one of the four roles in the game: Banker, Engineer, Pilot, and Scorekeeper. Each role has its own board and score sheet that students can place in front of them during game play.

Explain that their goal is to equip their drones with the best suite of cameras, batteries, and sensors possible in order to maximize the amount of science data they can collect at the volcano. This will help them earn the most cash rewards and enable them to upgrade their drones with better, more expensive equipment.

As they configure their drones, students can make decisions about how to orient the camera and sensor positions. For example, they might want to orient the camera toward the volcano to capture more details about its eruption. Or they might want to orient the battery in a different way than other students in order to optimize energy usage.

The drone can be very heavy, so it’s important to keep the payload mass fairly low. This will keep the drone’s rate of energy use low and allow students to spend more time hovering over the volcano collecting data.

Students might wish to add two lightweight sensors to the drone in order to increase the odds of drawing a Science Event Card that provides bonus Science Data Points. But they must balance a desire for more sensors with the need to keep the total payload mass as light as possible in order to be able to collect enough science data to generate cash rewards and upgrade their drones with better, more expensive items.