Blinks Games Primer

This list is by no means exhaustive and each of the mechanics, categories, and so forth are meant to be mixed, matched, or broken. We hate being boxed into categories ourselves, so no need to box you in either. Hopefully this helps to analyze games and find what parts are compelling, fun, engaging, and worth investigating further.

Mechanics

Fracture

Taking Blinks out of the middle of a pack is difficult, it is surrounded by magnets, so instead, we created Fracture (credit to Em Lazer-Walker for this mechanic). Break the board of Blinks into two halves (of any size, 6 & 6, or 1 & 11) and then translate, rotate, and put them back together.

Hinge (rotation)

Think fracture, except instead of freely moving the two parts that you have fractured, with hinge, one of the vertices acts as a hinge (you will feel it with the magnets) and then you can rotate the two parts around that hinge to reconnect. Works quite well with smaller games (6 - 9 pieces)

Flick

Sound painful? It isn’t. Blinks are up for the game and their enclosures are finger friendly. Test your dexterity in flicking Blinks into a specific arrangement. Play a game of table football or capture the flag with Blinks.

Spin

No, these are not fidget spinners… wait, do you want a fidget spinner? Okay, I guess you can fidget with them as well as spin them. When a Blink is spinning next to a neighbor, it can measure how fast it is spinning.

Button Mash

Just as it sounds, the buttons are factory tested to 200,000 presses… will your game prove us wrong?

Push/Pull

Use the strength of the magnets to make chains of Blinks that need to be dragged from one location to another. The bottoms of Blinks are meant to glide on a tabletop.

Free Range

Create a board for Blinks and use them as pieces that move around the table. While they are not aware of their absolute location on the table (at least not yet) they can rely on their other traits such as time and button presses.

Stack (highly experimental)

Blinks sadly don’t communicate vertically, but if you tilt them to 90º and then start stacking them, they will provide a thin and very unstable wall. They don’t know anything about their orientation, but they do know when they are together and when they have broken apart. I bet some cleverness could sense the fall as well.

Suggestions…?

Please, there are so many ways to interact with Blinks, you might spark the next game we create!

Gameplay

Map building

Treat Blinks as an arena that something can travel through or navigate. Maybe this is the bouncing of a ball, the flow of water, or spelunking of sorts. Blinks can rearrange to update the map, and even carry some knowledge of where the player has been.

Puzzle

In its simplest form, Blinks can hint and help along the way to solving a puzzle. Think of trying to achieve certain conformations or getting a group to behave in a certain way. Another puzzle might be diffusing a bomb in a Mastermind like way… Puzzles can contribute to a Blinks games or be the game in itself.

Real-Time Strategy

Using time as a variable in Blinks games is a powerful tool since time can be agreed upon across connected Blinks or maintained individually (i.e. each Blink dying over time with its own health meter in Mortals)

MMO - Massively Multiplayer Offline 🙂

A common question is, “do Blinks connect to devices or the internet?” Currently, nope. And we think it is a great feature and constraint… Blinks are completely self contained meaning you don’t have to trade your precious cell phone battery life to play a game on Blinks. That said, the internet is the most amazing of distributed systems, why wouldn’t we want to take advantage of such magic. If all goes well, there is a nice roadmap for Blinks, which includes new Blinks such as Blink blanks, allowing you to make and share your own games on Blinks. Blink blonk, an audio enabled Blink and Blink bloop blop, an IOT Blink, enabled with WiFi + BLE.