Preview: Bloxels

If you have ever visited a Big Red Barrel’s Tabletop Tuesday you know the drill – but for those who are not familiar, in a nutshell we get together to play board games and drink video game themed cocktails at Loading Bar every Tuesday of the year. In the early days of the event, a lot of the regulars came from the video game background. With the strong affinity of the blog and the venue with video games in general, a lot of the board games in the current library have ties to their screen siblings. When the event first started and Tabletop Tuesday was relatively new to the vast world of board games, board games based on video games were something familiar, comfortable and cosy. Even after a few years of running the event, now more knowledgeable in board game-verse, the connection between video games and board games is still very dear.

This is one of the reasons, among many others, why it was incredibly exciting to have Bloxels by Pixel Press as a special guest to show off exclusively for the first time in the UK. TableTop Tuesday attendees got to go hands-on with an idea for a video game board game turned 180 degrees. If I were to describe Bloxels, I think I would call it a ‘board game video game creator’.

Bloxels begins with a black game board made out of square grid. Players use different coloured blocks to build various layouts of the game board, where every block means something. For example, green blocks are walls, blue blocks are monsters and yellow blocks are coins. Afterwards the layout on the board can be captured via a free app and translated on screen into a completely playable video game level. The game can be as easy or as difficult as your imagination allows, and several levels linked together can be created and stored in the app. While that might sound pretty basic, and that is the idea, there are no limitations on how creative one could get with the game. To showcase the capabilities of Bloxels, Pixel Press created a game with Bloxels named B.R.A.V.E Squad, which will be available for iOS, Kindle and Android during the holidays this year and also included in several of their Kickstarter rewards.

The board gaming aspect of the game is harder than it may seem to be. Being in front of blank space with all the possible tools in front of you and having a freedom to design whatever level imaginable is a really hard start. It is easier to overcome restrictions and limitations successfully than to design something that is in complete isolation. When I was first presented with the board, I started placing cubes with a ‘how hard can it be’ attitude. However, as soon as my creation had been transformed to the screen I discovered that, to put in nicely, I had not designed the most exciting level in the world. On my second attempt I did better.

This experience is exactly what Bloxels is about: being strategically creative. This skill needs more nurturing that it might seem, and doing so through the two bellowed mediums – video games and board games – is an excellent idea. It is not hard to see then that Bloxels is a great game for kids. It fosters creativity through the incentive of the video game, two ideas that will excite almost any child. The fact that adults in their late 20s and 30s have been also thoroughly entertained by Bloxels throughout the night, just speaks to the quality of the design.

Bloxels is currently on Kickstarter until the 18^th of June. Although we can already congratulate it on being fully funded, additional stretch goals have been added that are worth checking it out. Bloxel’s Kickstarter page as well as their official website also has a lot more information on the game and on its benefits for children’s development that I would also suggest reading.

As a video gamer and a board gamer, I am always excited to see a product bridge these two worlds. If this product helps the creative development of children (and adults!), then even better! Bloxels lets you become a game designer without any coding skills and in about 5 minutes. At first it is deceptively simple hands on gaming device, but through playing it and exploring all the options available hidden within its coloured cubes, I could see this creating many creatively stimulating and fun hours.

Tags: App, B.R.A.V.E Squad, board games, kickstarter, Pixel Press