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Mackenzie Chapman, Antonio Blackmon, Elizabeth Wolff, Jarvis Du, and Makanvi Talawali
ENG 106-R48-44889
Brittany Biesiada
November 23, 2014
Boiler Up!
Boiler Up! is an interactive, strategic game that brings Purdue pride into a home.
Players use previous knowledge to answer fun facts about Purdue, hoping to win the game and
have the Boilermaker Special roll down their track.
Boiler Up! is a game that is all about Purdue. The game intertwines fun facts about
Purdue and strategy between players. To start the game, players must set up the game board.
They must put the specific stack of cards on the specific places allotted for them on the game
board. The construction cones go on the orange paper. Lastly, to finish setting up the game
board, the players must place the Boilermaker Special in the center of the game board. Then the
players may begin to play, the person who rolls the highest number goes first, then continue in a
counter-clockwise manner. The players all want to gain resource cards (steel, wood, or nails). To
get a steel, they must roll a one or two. To get a nail, they must roll three or four. To get wood,
they must roll a five or six. In order to get a train track, a player must use one steel card, one nail
card, and one wood card. After they have the proper payment for the track, they must answer a
trivia question. A player cannot place a track down until they answer the trivia question
correctly. You can only have one attempt at the trivia question per turn. Once a trivia has been
used, the trivia must go in a discard pile. Reminder, a player cannot gain a resource and lay a
track in the same turn.
The last number on the dice, six, is a special number. A player has a choice when they
roll a number six. They can either gain a wood or they have the ability to place a construction
zone (cone) on someones track. Construction zones are placed on an opponents track of the

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players choice. The opponent cannot play until they remove the construction zone. To remove a
construction zone, the player must either roll a 6, or remove the track that the construction zone
was placed on. You can only have one construction zone at a time on your track.
A player may only have five cards in their hand at once. Once a player has more than five
cards in their hand, they must discard. In the game, any players can make trades for specific
resources with their opponents. All trades must be made before the player rolls the dice.
The winner of the game is the person who has the longest train track by the end of the
time allotted to play the game, or until the players run out of train tracks to buy. The winner of
the game gets to roll the Boilermaker Special down their track.
Boiler Up! is a fun and interactive game that combines strategy and wit. Strategy is
necessary for making different decisions throughout the game like deciding whos train track you
want to put a construction zone on or determining which card you want to discard once you have
more than the allotted amount of cards in your hand. Wit, but more importantly Purdue
knowledge and pride, is also necessary for this game because you need to be able to answer the
different trivia questions about Purdue. Resources are also a key aspect of the game mechanics,
wood, steel, and nails are the resources needed to build a train track in Boiler Up!.
Any Purdue student, alumni, or fan will find themselves wanting to play this game to test
their knowledge of Purdue, or show their friends and family just how much they know and the
pride they have for the university. For Boiler Up! there is a large number of materials needed
in order to play. The necessary materials are the different resource cards for: wood, nails, and
steel. You will also need other people to play with, a die, the train tracks, the game board, trivia
cards and the construction cones. The Boiler Up! game board is a black circle with various
Purdue symbols on it like, Purdue Pete, the Purdue sign, the bell tower, the big bass drum, all

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different kinds of sporting equipment, and in the middle is the boilermaker special that you will
build your train tracks off of.
Boiler Up! is designed for people related to Purdue University, including Purdue
students, faculty & staff and Purdue alumni, as well as those who are big fans of Purdue
University. Players should be six or older because some of the questions require previous
knowledge and a sense of reasoning that could be hard for younger children to know. A six year
old, brought up in a Boilermaker family may know some of the trivia questions. This game is
designed with a Purdue background. Only Purdue-related people will understand the elements in
this game, and they are assumed as target players. In addition, this game aims at helping people
explore Purdue with a series of trivia questions and other Purdue elements. Those who are
interested in Purdue or involved in Purdue are more likely to play this game, and hence they are
targeted as the audience.
This game can be played almost at any time, but it is highly recommended to play it with
a group. Boiler Up! aims at having fun and enhancing friendship with knowledge of Purdue
University. The best time to play this game is at a tailgate, party night, or Boiler Gold Rush, to
name a few.
In regards to the academic resource of Boiler Up!, the creation of the game followed
the basic game design as laid out in the Braithwaite & Schreiber Challenges for Game
Designers reading. The reading describes game design as ...the process of creating the content
and rules of a game. When the development of Boiler Up! began, immediately the content
and rules of the game were decided with a focus on what would make the game strategically,
educational, and entertaining for the players. According to Braithwaite & Schreiber, there are

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many types of game design. Boiler Up! followed closely with the systematic design in which
the main focus was the rules and mathematical patterns that players would have to adhere to.
Another reading that applies to the creation of Boiler Up was the Salen & Zimmerman
Rules of Play, Game Design Fundamentals: Chapter 10 reading that introduced schemas. A
schema is the underlying structure for the framework of the game. The three main schemas are
rules, play and culture. The rules schema establishes the mathematical structures of Boiler Up!
meaning that through calculation and strategy, a player can become successful. The play schema
emphasizes on the hands on approach of a game. With Boiler Up!, the interaction with the
game lies in building tracks while detouring opponents. The culture schema concentrates on both
the culture and theme of a game. In regards to Boiler Up!, the culture schema revolves around
Purdue University with Purdue themes found throughout the game board, cards, etc.
If Boiler Up! had two games it could closely be compared to, they would be Trivial
Pursuit and Settlers of Catan. In comparison to Trivial Pursuit, both contain trivia questions
that must be answered in order to progress in the game, if the answer is wrong then nothing is
gained and it is the next players turn. In comparison to Settlers of Catan, both games require
the players to roll dice for a chance to gain resources, in order to build themselves to victory. All
three of the games contain a board and games pieces for each player. Though similar in some
aspects, Boiler Up! is more unique in the way that it somewhat incorporates strategies of both
Trivial Pursuit and Settlers of Catan, with its own twists, such as answering a trivia to gain a
resource, and turns to make it original.

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Works Cited
Braithwaite, Brenda, and Schreiber, Ian. Challenges for Game Designers: Chapter 1. Course
Technology, 2009. Web. 12 Nov. 2014.
Purdue University- Facts Online. Purdue U. Web. 31 Oct. 2014.
Salen, Katie, and Zimmerman, Eric. Rules of Play, Game Design Fundamentals: Chapter 10.
MIT Press, 2003. Web. 12 Nov. 2014.
Yu, Eliana. Test what you know about Purdue with trivia from PSUB Trivia Night. The
Exponent. n.p., 2014. Web. 31 Oct 2014.