Oeuvre in Review: Part 5 (2016, cont.)

Sunblink

The most board gamey of the entries on this list, Sunblink was designed for the Game Chef 2016 design challenge. Game Chef is a now-defunct game design challenge, a sort of game jam, that announced its theme and “ingredients” only as the challenge was launched. You then had ten days to make a game. Afterwards, games were reassigned to participants for peer review. 2016’s theme was Technology and the ingredients were alarm, dance, sketch, and sunlight—you were required to use at least two, ideally three, somehow in your design.

Sunblink is a competitive card game with no specific roleplay elements. Players play unnamed researchers from another planet using “sunblink” technology to extract information out of sunlight. The pseudoscience was that light reflects off of surfaces and continues to travel through space; therefore, light particles can recall what they’ve reflected off of previously. These Memories were specifically of inventions/advancements in history, coupled with eras and regions of origin. Memories had different point values for completing with bonus points available for matching eras or origins.

The most interesting mechanic comes in with the code cards: the process for completing Memory cards. The game comes with a deck of 99 cards with little symbols I’d drawn. The players have to redraw these symbols within fifteen seconds—a task that gets harder the more code cards required. Players can steal each other’s cards and research their own cards to make them harder to steal. For the most part, it’s a quick, card-based party game with a fun sci-fi setting.

I had approached game design, at least as Whimsy Machine, with the goal of focusing on tabletop roleplaying games. However, in 2016, I was also working on a large licensed board game project for the day job (for real, a story for another time). It was fun working on, and I think I would like to dabble in these kinds of board, card, and party games again. As adulthood thickened and then the pandemic dropped, I’d end up playing fewer and fewer of these kinds of games, mostly sticking to ttrpgs in online spaces or with one particular group of friends. Given my experience on the Big Licensed Board Game, I wasn’t eager to dive back into that world anyways.

I miss the Game Chef challenges—it’ll come up again—and the tabletop and board game gaming community on Google+. But G+ fell, as is the way with these things, and the crowd dispersed. It was fun and informative in the meantime, even if I have no real intention of dusting this one off anytime soon.