Preorder Cellulose: A Plant Cell Biology Game
Cellulose is a worker placement game that puts 1-5 players inside a plant cell, where they will compete over limited resources in order to undergo photosynthesis, produce carbohydrates, and build the cell wall to score points. With everyone vying for the same actions, players must time their use of proteins, hormones, and cell component cards in order to diversify their strategies and outplay the competition!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Cellulose Live Playthrough and Last Chance to Plant Trees!
over 3 years ago
– Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 12:12:37 PM
Hello Cellulose Backers,
Here's a quick update for today with some upcoming events!
The link should be up afterwards, if you miss it. Hopefully this is a great chance to see Cellulose in action and get a feel for the gameplay!
Last Day to Plant a Tree!
We're planting a tree for every backer in the first 3 days of the campaign, which lasts through tomorrow morning. TreeSisters.org is active around the world, working within local communities toward tropical reforestation with a strategic view toward ecological restoration. They're awesome. We're thrilled to help them with 1700+ trees, and if you're on the fence, it's a good time to back for $1 and plant a tree from your fence 😉.
Stretch Goals
Finally, a quick stretch goal check in:
We unlocked the fancy hormones and are working toward a custom Water Level Marker. This thing goes up and down the Water Level, tracking how much water is left for the round. A cube works, but it'd be great to have a nice chunky version of our water level icon for that space.
That's it for now! We hope to see some of y'all at the playthrough.
Steve & The Genius Games Team
Welcome to Cellulose!
over 3 years ago
– Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 12:38:14 PM
What a first day! This is the biggest KS launch we've ever had, and it’s still growing quickly, fast approaching $100k! Thank you all so much!
John began working on the research and some core mechanics for Cellulose (“Plant Cell Cytosis Game") around the time that Cytosis was published. It got some occasional attention, but was never the main project until I (Steve) joined Genius and we started working on it together in earnest almost 2 years ago.
We’ve been through many design iterations with Cellulose, but the core goals have stayed the same:
Showcase the unique features and tensions of plant cells: cell walls, the central vacuole, plant hormones, and above all, photosynthesis
Make a heavier sequel to Cytosis with some shared gameplay, but more space for playing different strategies and more player interaction
Span from the cellular level to the scale of the entire organism, so the “story” of the plant’s growth can parallel your own engine building
We think you’re really going to enjoy Cellulose. The core actions are easy to learn, but cell component cards provide delightful opportunities to be clever, the decisions for your precious few action markers can be excruciating, and the competition over the vacuole majority is infuriating in the best way.
Some Thanks and Credits
John and I also want to say a quick thanks to the other folks on our team who have helped make this game great: Tomasz Bogusz is my favorite artist, and made plant cells look somehow delicious. Daniel Dávalos joined our development+production team last year, and Bailey Preib a couple months ago, and they’ve both provided invaluable input as we’ve worked to simplify, streamline, and balance the game. Sarah Lafser is a graphic design alchemist, who makes wonderful things from my incoherent requests. Shae Sanders joined us this year to run our Operations, and Michelle Bulgerin continues to handle Customer Support -- we literally wouldn’t have a company without them.
Thanks also to our community — we’ve had dozens of playtesters and science consultants and other input from hundreds of folks who love challenging games with accurate science.
Stretch Goal Updates
After hitting our funding goal in under an hour, we blew past the first 2 stretch goals yesterday!
At $50k, we unlocked a giant Plant Cell First Player Marker. (Get ready to throw this thing at the player who takes it from you.)
At $75k, we unlocked custom Health Point markers in the shape of our scoring flower-star. (With luck, we can upgrade these again later!)
If we make it to $100k (which is looking good!), we’ll upgrade the Plant Hormone resources in the game from cubes to custom wooden resources based (loosely) on the molecular structure of auxin, an important plant hormone.
We’ll have more to come after that!
Tantrum House Livestream TOMORROW
We’ll have more ways for you to check out Cellulose over the coming weeks. Tomorrow evening, Tantrum House is doing a livestream of the game at 6:30 EDT / 3:30 PDT / 22:30 GMT/UTC (it’ll be saved if you miss it).
We've had a few questions about the shipping costs to the Europe. The shipping prices for this campaign include global freight, distribution center costs, shipping, and local taxes -- including VAT in the U.K. and EU.
There are different ways that Kickstarter campaigns have handled VAT in the past, some of which used a special exemption for lower-priced items fulfilled from within the EU (this is what "friendly shipping" labels have often meant). That exemption is ending in July of this year, and most Kickstarters fulfilled after that point will reflect, in some way, a ~20% VAT on all EU pledges. We have heavily subsidized our actual shipping rates to try to keep your total cost lower, but we realize that the listed shipping costs are higher than on many previous Kickstarters. Unfortunately, we expect this to become standard for most projects fulfilling in the U.K. and EU going forward, including retail pledges. We're putting together some bulk pledges to save on the actual shipping costs, but the VAT costs will continue to add a substantial amount to these pledges.
That's enough for now! We'll keep you updated as we progress throughout the campaign, with more information about aspects of the game and production. Let us know if you have any questions or requests - we're still at work on the game and production and welcome your input :)
