Let me begin this post by bemoaning the state of Legos today. I was most enamored of the plastic bricks in the early-to-mid nineties – my interest lay chiefly with the Space and Castle-themed sets, which were seeing a particular boom during that period. Every year, the company would release a new, original, themed set of models, often with brand-new special pieces like massive laser cannons and dragons. Every holiday season was spent pining over Lego catalogs, wondering just which model would end up under the tree, and while most of the themed sets had backstories to go along with them, the company left it to the kid to fill in most of the blanks. Now, I go into the Lego aisle, and the pickings are slim. Most of the models there are licensed products from evergreen franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter and SpongeBob SquarePants which, while still fun enough, are a far cry from the Lego company’s in-house creations. Imagination, an important component of the Lego experience, is traded for familiarity and marketability.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I heard about the newest Lego game: it’s called Creationary, and it’s a damn fun time. Boiling Creationary down to a sentence is easy: it’s Pictionary with Legos. This doesn’t quite sum it up, but it’s enough to go on. Among the varied rulesets that come with the game, some constants can be found: there are three piles of cards, labeled as easy, medium, and hard. On each individual card are four different pictures, each in one of four categories. There is a single die, itself constructed of Legos, which is rolled to determine which category you'll have to build. And, of course, there is a tray full of Lego bricks, which you use to construct the things pictured on the cards. Under the default rules, one Builder rolls the die and selects a card from whichever difficulty pile he or she is the most comfortable. On the easy cards, you build things like buckets and arrows. On one of the hard cards I selected, I was tasked with rendering the fucking Parthenon in Lego bricks.
The other players guess what you’re building, and both the first person to correctly guess what the Builder is making and the Builder himself gets a point. Play then passes to another Builder, and play repeats until someone has five points. I carefully hedge my descriptions with words like “constants” and “defaults” because the game ships with several sets of rules, and encourages you to change them and make up new ones to suit your play style. The die can be taken apart and put back together any way you want – snap a question mark block on the die, says the manual, and build your own creation without using the cards. Build something using only one color of Lego brick. Build with your eyes closed. The manual has plenty of suggestions to use as jumping-off points, each encouraging you to customize the game and make it your own. The thing I like the most about Creationary (excepting the fact that no one doesn’t like Legos) is that it so thoroughly embodies the spirit of creativity and imagination at the core of Lego’s appeal.
Just as a Lego model can be built, changed, torn apart, and rebuilt again, Creationary is malleable and invites invention. The pieces remain the same each time, but the end result can be as different as you want it to be. Likewise, the game is just as fun for a group of adults as it is for families. I enjoyed it with some friends and a few beers, while Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik went on at length recently about how much fun it was to play with his six-year-old son (scroll down). The game’s asking price is about $35 – a bit pricey for a board game, certainly. But if you enjoy board games (or if you just want something fun to pull out at a party) Creationary is an incredibly worthwhile addition to your collection.The popular and fun game of Creationary takes on a fresh new twist with a Lego theme! Test your creative skills and guessing ability to the limit as you use Lego blocks to build various items from the card decks provided. Find out more in our full Lego Creationary game review.
Lego, the fantastic little building blocks are popular with all ages and have spanned decades – and with this game, you even build the dice! Simple to learn but hard to master, this game is great family fun. The variety of cards and bricks ensures that no two games are the same. Lego Creationary is a simple game to play. Roll the dice to select a build category from the four available – vehicles, buildings, nature or things – and draw a card from the appropriate pile. Once you have looked at your card, then you must use every ounce of creativity you have to build the item on the card from the bricks available. The person who correctly guesses what you have built first gets the next turn! The game is marketed at 5-12 year olds, but would be suitable for adults too as we all know – nobody really grows out of Lego! We think that this game would be a great investment for families or students and is the perfect choice for holiday entertainment. The card decks have basic and advanced levels to make sure that all players have a chance to win and have fun.
In the box, you get the build-able dice, four sets of build cards (96 in all), a large assortment of Lego bricks, one lego mini figure and one lego micro figure. The game requires a little bit of space to play on, but not too much – a dining or coffee table would be perfect. A game takes roughly between 30 minutes and an hour to play, and an optimum group size is 3 to 8 people. An exciting and fresh take on a game which is sure to appeal to anyone that enjoys games such as Pictionary, and – of course – to any Lego fan! Whether it’s a quick game to fill an hour with the kids, or you make an afternoon of it with friends and family, you will have a great time with Lego Creationary. Check Price & Buy Now >This is part 2 of a series of blog posts about our first summer rapid prototyping experiment. See part 1 for the background. We’ve had one development week so far. During the week of July 4th, we had only about 3 days worth of development, and many of those days were not shared by everyone involved.
This interesting constraint led to the development of #bloqprty – a simple party game played with a set of cards that we created and building toys (we used LEGO® for this prototype, but designed the game to be flexible enough for any other kind of construction toy). This first project turned out to be the perfect first project for our process. On Monday, we started with the goal of creating a game for commercial building toys that takes advantage of their affordances. Our interpretation of this is that the verbs used when playing with the toys should be natural verbs used within the game. How do people usually play with LEGO®? sometimes with a plan, but often with a general idea and a lot of trial and error. They show their creations off. If playing with a group they often laugh at the silly things that they made. At the end of the day, we had created a card-based party game that provided structure to this natural play by combining the rule changes of Fluxx, the judgement mechanics of Apples to Apples, and building things with a common LEGO® basic set (their 600-piece yellow bucket).
On day two, we asked ourselves: why wouldn’t people just play with LEGO® as they are? Why do we need to make a game? From this, we talked about the values we want to reinforce with LEGO® play (creativity, sharing, socializing) and surmised that adults (and kids) sometimes need practice or a safe environment to engage with construction kits. We liked imposing constraints on building: they seemed to help with creativity. Having some amount of subjective judgement helped with sharing and socializing. We quickly realized that scoring and winning weren’t only unimportant, they were antithetical to the play we wanted to see happen. From there, we came up with an elegant win condition: everyone wins when they start building with LEGO® without the need for the cards! From this values discussion, it became easy to decide which rule cards would work for the game (we removed cards with physical limitations – build eyes closed, with one hand), how rules would be agreed upon and interpreted, and what the style of the game would be.
While prototyping the game, we started with just having rules that defined how the building should happen, but found ourselves having to struggle about what to actually make. We borrowed cards from the LEGO® Creationary game to help us out – the game we were making wasn’t that far from Pictionary™, so it made sense. However, because the Creationary cards are pictorial, we found ourselves trying to recreate the picture. The time limit encouraged us to just try to make what was on the picture rather than the concept represented by the picture. We switched to Pictionary™-style cards with words rather than pictures, and our builds became much more varied and interesting. We tried to go further and use adjectives as well as nouns, but we quickly realized that these concepts weren’t as fun – we’d get locked in thought while the timer ran out. To encourage different kinds of builds, we opted to keep our cards to nouns, but closer to taxonomies than specific nouns (e.g. musical instrument instead of trumpet, zoo animal instead of giraffe or penguin, bird instead of parrot).
The end result is a game about design as well as creativity. The players of the game are tasked with designing their own challenges for themselves, interpreting the rules, negotiating conflicts (both between rules and between players), and even creating new rule cards for themselves. Our rules for the game are short and vague on purpose: we want players to create the game that they want to play, with the help of some basic design practices. Andrew Grant, Philip Tan, and Abe Stein participated as designers, I was producer/designer, and Sara Verilli came in halfway to test and design. Graphics and layout were by Abe Stein, rules writing by Philip Tan, Sara Verrilli, and Rik Eberhardt. Some interesting, board game specific approaches to design we tried were passing the rules between us to be completely written from scratch. I wrote the basic playtest quality rules and a first draft dry version – they collected our decisions, but required guidance from a designer to understand. Sara came in halfway through and re-wrote the rules after playing the game, first giving a completely descriptive run through with little room for interpretation, and then condensed that to a single page.
On the last day, Philip then re-wrote these with the voice we wanted the game to have: that the rules are modifiable, flexible, open to interpretation. While this took a bit of time from everyone to re-write the rules from scratch (and even do new layouts from scratch), the process helped hone down the rules to our most basic needs. Each person brought a new perspective to the rules, and we avoided the bloat that often happens in collaborative documents – after Sara’s first draft each revision was a removal rather than an add. To play, download the #bloqprty Rules and the #bloqprty Cards. The cards are sized as business cards. Print them to heavy paper and cut them out along the lines. We even provided art for the backs of the cards (the #bloqprty logo) – make as many needed for your cards and for each insert a front and a back card into clear playing card sleeves. We aren’t finished with the game. The game has tested well within the Lab, but we haven’t tried other building toys with it and we haven’t had non-game designers play it yet.