Earth has been taken over by artificial intelligence and the human survivors must try to blend, while conspiring, collecting data and technology and seeking to take back the planet.

That’s the world “Emergence” drops you in as you begin the game of teamwork and deception.

Bellevue natives Billy Sheng, Benjamin Morgan and Jordan Roberts — who met freshman year at Bellevue High School — have developed the tabletop board game.

Adam Jacobson, another Bellevue native on the marketing side of things, said the game started with boredom and has evolved into an exciting business venture.

“In high school we used to play basketball,” he said. “We went off to our separate colleges, did our own things and had our own majors. We never really played board games. But then they picked up basketball again and couldn’t play in the winter, so we needed a new idea.”

Sheng had the idea of playing board games to get the high school crew back together. Every Tuesday the group would meet at Cafe Mox Boarding House in Bellevue to play board games.

Many of the friends moved back to Seattle after college, while Jacobson moved to Silicon Valley.

“[Sheng] thought it might be easy to make a game of our own,” Jacobson said. “Quite the contrary. You need people of way different skillsets to put together something like this.”

The group founded Liminal Games with help from many friends and colleagues (Adrian Chan, Albert Byun, Andrew Lau, Austin Kihara, Chris Park, George Tang, Jarrett Thorsted, Spencer Mischka, Stephen Han and Vincent Nguyen are some of those who helped on Emergence).

Even with the difficulties, Liminal found success by turning to the internet. A Kickstarter page for the game exceeded Jacobson’s wildest expectations, raising more than $10,000 in the first 24 hours and more than $64,000 with just a few days to go.

“Kickstarter has a strong board game community,” Jacobson said. “This game has a decent amount of deception to hide your identity from the other team. The concept will be familiar to experienced board game players.”

The group took ideas they liked from other games, cut stuff they didn’t like, tweaked rules and gameplay and came up with the sci-fi Emergence. There is resource gathering similar to “Settlers of Catan” and trickery, deception and backstabbing, similar to games like “Mafia” and “One Night Ultimate Werewolf.”

Sheng was the entrepreneurial mind behind the game, but even so, the group lacked some business experience. It’s been a learning process even in estimates for raising funds.

“We thought $10,000 was a good goal for the game after looking at similar projects in the past,” Jacobson said. “There are lots of good Kickstarter games out there. You have to have good content in the game to make something people want to buy.”

From conception to now has been a stressful six or seven months, he said.

Even so, the group ambitiously put “stretch goals” at levels above the basic $15,000 which would get the game funded. Each new level of goals allows the team to plan, order and provide new facets to the game. Early funders are rewarded with the game at a discounted price.

The game will ship to backers (which include some independent game stores around the country) in September.

“We send our thanks to everyone for supporting a local group of friends working on a project we all enjoy,” Jacobson said.