Kickstarter Alert: Bloxels

Bloxels is finally here! Well, sort of. It’s finally on Kickstarter. Bloxels is the newest game from the gang at Pixel Press, who previously ran a successful Kickstarter for the innovative Floors app, which lets you draw a video game level on good ol’ fashioned paper and watch it come to life on your iPad. (Full disclosure: I was a backer of the Floors Kickstarter.)

Bloxels takes that concept one step further. It consists of a physical board and colorful cubes with which you can create and build customized video game levels. The color cubes represent walls, coins, turrets, villains, barriers, gems, keys, and doors. Place them in the 13×13 gameboard to design your level, scan the whole thing with your tablet, and–voila!–customize and play your very own creation!

I got a quick hands-on demo with a prototype at this year’s Toy Fair and actually included it in my Toy Fair Top 10 roundup. It’s an innovative and unique game/toy hybrid that really stands out for both its simplicity and its potential.

I should also mention that this game makes no qualms about its target audience: kids. In fact, a big selling point of Bloxels is that even the youngest potential gamers can figure out and play the game. Case in point? Check out this amazingly adorable video of the CEO’s 2-year-old daughter playing the game:

Bloxels asks kids to use their imagination and creativity in the real, physical world (gasp!) before they dive into the pixellated fantasy worlds within their mobile devices. Who is Bloxels good for? Well, anyone. Who is it great for? Budding engineers, game designers, programmers, and dungeon explorers age 5(ish) and up.

The gameboard and cubes are the building blocks (pun intended) of the game. The real meat of the game is in the app, which is the engine that brings the games to life. The Pixel Press gang is planning to bring several different scenarios/games into this framework, and first up is BRAVE Squad: “a top-down, dungeon-crawler action-RPG in which intergalactic heroes go from planet to planet, trying to rid the world of bad guys.”

I could explain it all, but this video they put together does a much better job of describing gameplay and selling the game than I can…

There are various backer levels with assorted swag, but the game itself is included at the $50 level. The Kickstarter actually just passed its funding goal with more than two weeks to go, so if you’re at all curious, hop on over to Kickstarter, check out their videos, give Floors a go to see what they’ve already done, and consider backing Bloxels.

New to Kickstarter? Read our crowdfunding primer.