We went to see The Force Awakens on Friday. (Short review: it’s terrific and you should go and see it.) The comments here are a spoiler-free zone: comments which give away any of the plot will be removed.

There are few things I enjoy more at a fairground than a shooting gallery. (This is because they’re one of the few carnival games I can be guaranteed to beat Eben at.)

Koldo Santisteban likes Star Wars and shooting galleries too, so he combined the two in a home-built party game.

(If I’d been making this, each of those targets would have had JAR-JAR BINKS’ FACE on them.)

There are only five targets in this build, but it’s infinitely expandable, so if you make your own you can add more. Each target is managed by an Arduino, which controls a servo motor and an infrared receiver. A Raspberry Pi manages the information from the targets, keeping score, assigning sounds to each target and speeding things up as the game progresses.

You’re given a fixed amount of time to play in. Each target makes a different noise when hit. To stop people using the gun in a machine gun style, it has been programmed to “overheat” (or, more accurately, vibrate and blink) if someone keeps the trigger depressed.

Details about the build are available at Koldo’s blog – he’s asking those interested in making their own who need further instructions to contact him there.