Computer Junkyard Has You Building a PC From Scrap

Anyone who spent a chunk of their youth elbow-deep in a beige tower, swapping RAM sticks and praying the thing would POST, is the exact target here. Computer Junkyard is a 2-4 player race about picking over a scrapyard for hardware and bolting it onto a motherboard until you have a machine that will actually run your software.

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Every player starts with a software tile carrying its own system requirements: so much storage, so much memory, so much processing power. From there it is a scramble. Cash is tight, part prices swing with supply so a run on hard drives makes them expensive and a glut makes them cheap, and you can trade with rivals or make their lives miserable by introducing bugs and pinching components off their build. First player to finish a machine and install their software wins.

If you have ever explained the difference between RAM and storage to a relative, you already know which of your friends will love this. The clever bit is that the assembly is guided by block diagrams, so the game teaches you what actually plugs into what along the way. Dream Egg Games is clear that no prior computer knowledge is needed, which matters if you want to bring this to a mixed table rather than a room full of sysadmins.

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Games run 60 to 90 minutes for ages 14 and up, and it retails at $54.95. The Kickstarter is long finished, and according to the publisher it funded in four minutes and drew more than 2,800 backers. Copies are shipping now through Amazon, with a retailer form on the Dream Egg site for shops that want to stock it.

It gets its convention debut at Gen Con in Indianapolis from 30 July to 2 August, on booth 163, so anyone going can get hands on it before committing.

Get a game night in the diary and find out which of your group secretly misses building PCs.

Sources: Dream Egg Games | Gen Con