Twinkle is now Live on Kickstarter! We had the chance to get some inside info by Theodore Karvounis the designer of the game!

Interview with the designer of Twinkle!

1. Hello! Please let us know a few things about yourself!

I’m Theo Karvounis, a designer from Athens, Greece. I like designing games that offer new and innovative ways for people to have fun playing together. I have a soft spot for games with minimal rules and fast turns of few but interesting decisions.

2. How did the idea of making Twinkle come up?

I wanted to create (and play) a game with a rich dice experience that would fit in a small box. So, the backbone was having lots of dice in many colors and shapes. Another goal was for each die to be unique (no duplicates) and to have its own purpose in the game. Especially the colors, I really tried to give a different character and strategy to every color. Then the theme and the name came naturally, and never changed because they both seemed to me like the perfect fit.

3. What was the greatest challenge that you faced during the designing of the game?

A great deal of the playtesting was spent in trying to mitigate the luck factor. With all these dice it was quite challenging to make every roll matter, to find clever ways that would enable the players to use both good and bad rolls and never let the rolls be the deciding factor for the win. I was lucky enough to have a great group of playtesters that helped me a lot to streamline the game in every aspect.

4. Which aspect of design did you enjoy the most?

Maybe because it’s more recent but I really enjoyed designing the campaign for the solo mode. Lots of cool little ideas were tested and I got really excited with how we kept improving things so that the player will have a memorable solo experience. It was like designing a movie or an adventure game walking the player through carefully directed easy and hard missions until the final boss fight!

5. Would you like to share some key elements that you are excited about? What is special about this game?

The accessibility of the game, it’s super easy to teach and lasts only 15 minutes while at the same time, it also offers great challenges even for experienced gamers. With all these types of mission cards, the game is highly modular making it as light or mind-twisting as the players want. Finally, I really like how it looks on the table and it’s definitely something so unlike anything else we’ve seen so far in other games.

6. What kind of gaming experience do you want to create with this game?

The focal point as I noted earlier is the dice. I want the players to enjoy the plethora of dice colors and types and also feel like they accomplished something unique and beautiful as they keep adding stars to their constellation and especially at the end of the game when they look proudly at their completed project.

7. What kind of players are going to enjoy Twinkle the most?

It’s a cliché, I know, but I really believe that almost anyone can enjoy playing it. The sky is the limit here, I can totally see families loving it, couples enjoy playing 1 vs 1, heavy gamers putting it on their self as the go-to game-night filler, even solo gamers, with the upcoming highly challenging solo mode!