**Update! First Stretch Goal unlocked! See below for details and for how we can unlock even more Tiny Games and a free coaster for ALL BACKERS!**
Tiny Games is a smartphone app bursting with HUNDREDS of games
designed to fit right in to your life no matter where it takes you. Answer a couple of questions and the app will pick a game just for your situation, company, mood, and nearby props. It will smoothly take you through the rules and then you’ll be off and running, maybe literally!
As Seen In:
We made it! Thank you!
Unbelievable! We are ever so excited to direct your attention to the bit on the right of the screen that shows that the project is now funded. That means the app will get made! The amazing reward swag will ship! People across the globe will be unpacking tea towels and beer coasters and Drunk Dungeon sets! Thank you to everyone who helped get us here - whether you're one of the people who's sent thousands of messages, one of our ONE THOUSAND+ backers, or one of the finest minds in experimental game design pledging to our cause. It's clear that there's a lot of you out there who share our vision for endless real-world play, made possible by your phone, and we're more committed than ever to making this dream a reality.
Stretch Goal Unlocked!
We're British, what can we say. We love to queue. Queues in the supermarket, queues in the post office, queues where you have to take a ticket with a number on, queues for gigs or theme parks or Wimbledon tennis matches... We think there are a tonne of great features about queues that are ripe for Tiny Game-ification, and you just unlocked them. Thank you!
Next Stretch Goal!
Oh yes. Tiny Games for your photocopier. Tiny Games for dull business meetings. Tiny Games for Microsoft Excel. Tiny Games to play with your boss, without your boss's knowledge. WORK is a huge one, an absolute motherlode of opportunities for play and procrastination - get us to this target and we'll do it all!
**BONUS COASTER** - and if that weren't enough - if we hit £32k we'll print a special bonus beer coaster with a unique backers-only game on it and slip it in the envelope for all of you who've pledged for a physical reward.
There's so much more we'd like to do! If you need some inspiration for where Tiny Games might take you, take a look at this brilliant recent coverage in Forbes or The Guardian. Or perhaps, for now, just allow us to say thank you once again. Your support and kindness and enthusiasm means more than we can say.
With love,
The Hide&Seek Team
The Rewards
We think the rewards really express the awesomeness of Tiny Games in a tonne of different ways. Every single backer gets a copy of a pdf with Tiny Games designed by a who's who of interesting game design: Jane McGonigal, Doug Wilson, Bernie DeKoven, Bennett Foddy, Robin Hunicke, Ricky Haggett, Charles Cecil, PAN Studio, James Wallis, Kars Alfrink, Fred Deakin, Eric Zimmerman, Colleen Macklin, Scott Nicholson, Coney, Ira Fay, Celia Pearce, Come Out & Play and Jesse Schell. What a list! Then, from £8 and up, you get the app itself - we'll be racing to get it into your hands.
£12 adds in a pretty amazing array of digital rewards - read here for a complete rundown on all the good stuff you get.
DRUNK DUNGEON
A complete set of everything you need to play Drunk Dungeon, the world's most ornate drinking game.
It's a five-hundred-tile game that you play over the course of a party, and we've run it at all sorts of brilliant events - but it's never before been available to the public We've now developed a version that works for the home, and the only way to get it until 2014 at the earliest is through this Kickstarter.
(Picture is of an early version of the game, actual reward will differ in some respects - click here for full info.)
THE TEA TOWEL
A gorgeous cotton tea towel, sunny and full of games - featuring "Goal!", "Flippin' 'Eck", "Spooner or Later" and "A Watery End", all games that are not only (a) great fun, but also (b) use the tea towel itself in play, making it great for more than just explaining games and drying dishes.
(Picture is a mock-up and may differ slightly from the final print version)
THE MUG
The mug is big and warming and covered in games. It'll be printed non-digitally with bright, beautiful colours, wrapped around by seven carefully-created hot-drink-relevant games - and a secret eighth game on the inside.
(Pictures are mockups and may differ slightly from final print versions)
THE COASTERS
The coasters feature six different games: "Coinflip Coasters", "That Wasn't Milk!", "The Winning Coaster", "Acrononymous", "Starting Sentences", and "Coastdown".
The backs are crammed with mysterious symbols and sigils for use in the games - but you'll have to get the coasters to find out what they're for...
(Pictures are mock-ups and may differ slightly from the final print version)
THE T-SHIRT
There's going to be a choice of t-shirt designs; one more graphical, and one crammed full of games. As you can see, this one's crammed with games:
There'll be five great games to play while you're out and about, printed on cotton t-shirts (choice of unisex and women's) with a big, bright, non-digital print. The t-shirts will ONLY EVER be available via this Kickstarter.
Check back next week for a look at the final t-shirt!
(Picture is a mock-up and may differ slightly from the final print version)
More About Tiny Games
We're bringing together every kind of game you can think of: chase games, people-watching games, word games, creative games, shopping games, strategic games, storytelling games and a bunch more words we can't even think of right now. To get a better picture of what kind of games to expect, please watch the video above, plus you can download the complete rules for those games in this PDF.
You'll only need to read a few sentences of explanation for any given game; we're trying to create the maximum amount of fun for the minimum amount of rules-reading. You'll also get any digital tools you need to play whatever that game is - dice, spinners, timers and so on - and a record for posterity of the best bits of each game.
Initially there'll be five locations for games: the home (further sub-divided into living room, kitchen, bathroom or bedroom), the pub, on the road (by bus or train or car), on a walk (whether in the city, the country, or a park), and in one other location to be chosen by a vote of our backers.
This is just the start - if successful, we're planning to add a load more games, locations, occasions, as well as special releases for holidays and events, all within the same fun, approachable framework. And to make sure it is fun and friendly, we're thrilled to be collaborating with IGF-nominated art director Luke Whittaker of State of Play Games on the visual design.
We're Hide&Seek, an award-winning game design studio based in London and New York. A lot of the games we’ve made haven’t been videogames: they've been games you play in the real world. If you're interested, have a look at the game we ran for 12,000 players in Edinburgh on New Year's Day; or the festival we put on at the Southbank Centre.
We've already polished the format of Tiny Games through a lot of practice. Last year, we made 99 Tiny Games for all 33 boroughs of London, in the form of vinyl posters that went up in parks and on busy shopping streets. The project was an amazing success, described as "brilliantly innovative" by The Guardian Gamesblog and featured in Wired and the Wall Street Journal. You can read more about the history of Tiny Games here.
We've made and distributed our own games before, most notably with the Board Game Remix Kit, which uses four boardgames we've all got and remixes them to create 25 exciting new games, tweaks and mash-ups. BoingBoing called it "the most insanely clever Christmas gift idea of the year".
We want to encourage real-world play everywhere, not just where we are. That's why we're making this app.
Accessibility and Settings
The app will have persistent settings that help it to choose the right game for you - if you can't run, say, or if you're colourblind, or you're mostly playing with kids and you don't want any games that might tend to the risque, then you can tell the app and it'll take that into account when it works out what game you should play.
To make the Tiny Games experience as good as it can possibly be, we need your help.
We need the wonderful people of Kickstarter to help us shape the app itself! We'll be opening up the development process to all our backers - sharing game rules, builds, and design progress blogs - and we'll be depending on feedback from you to help make everything amazing. We hope you'll get involved in playtesting games, letting us know when our explanations aren't clear, guiding the choice of locations that you want to play Tiny Games in. It'll be super fun.
And then, obviously, well, we need money. To make this app as beautiful as it can be, stuffing it with games, pumping it full of tools to help those games run smoothly.
We'll use the money for a few different things:
- Visuals. We're a small studio without an in-house designer, and we want Tiny Games to be beautiful. We've got UX experts and amazing artist Luke Whittaker on board, but we need to be able to pay them.
- More development time. We've made a prototype of the game, and begun refining how it works in practice, but we need to do more work to make sure it's exactly as smooth and seamless and effective as possible.
- More games. We've designed a lot of Tiny Games already, somewhere in the low to mid hundreds, and we're adding to that number every day, but in order to have a genuine range of games for you - wherever you are, however many people are with you, whatever mood you're in and whatever props you have to hand - we're going to need more than "a lot" - we're going to need absolutely loads, and that takes time. We need to playtest, polish and refine, and that takes time too.
We want the app to be as good as possible and in your hands as soon as possible. We're asking for the smallest amount of money we can honestly do that for.
We don't want to get too ahead of ourselves, but we need to lay out some important info about this Kickstarter and about platforms in particular. The £25k target enables us to ship this app on iOS only. We really, really want to be able to extend this to Android too, so we really hope you can help us stretch!
If we don't make the £45k stretch goal in the Kickstarter, we still plan on releasing an Android version - it will just arrive after the iOS version has launched.
- £28k - Tiny Games For Queues! **UNLOCKED**
- £32k - Tiny Games For Work and A Coaster for Everyone!
- £35k - Secret!
- £40k - Secret!
- £45k - ANDROID VERSION !
Risks and challenges
The Tiny Games App faces the usual risks and challenges of app development, with an added layer of making games that generate fun in the real world. We're a very experienced team of real-world game designers and app developers with decades of experience and dozens of shipped games between us, so you're in good hands.
Crucial to the success of the app is making enough games that there's one that suits every occasion, and making an interface to select games that's both fast and playful. We think the process of choosing game should be almost as fun as playing the game itself... We're classifying each game we come up with in incredibly tedious detail, we're trying out different methods for picking games to suggest, we're coming up with ways to playtest the suggestion process as well as the games overall.
We're building playtesting into the process from the start, both for the individual games and the process of selecting and suggesting games overall, so that we can deal with problems as they arise.
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Funding period
- (22 days)