Sweet spot

Magicave hopes its Venn puzzler will introduce a new category of game

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Truly new ideas, in games as elsewhere, are hard to come by. “The design process is often seeing something someone else has built and going, 'That's cool, but wouldn't it be cool if [you changed this]',” says Ste Curran, creative director at 'digital toy' developer Magicave. A genuinely original game is “the dream”, he admits. “But that's often unattainable.”

No wonder Curran remembers the moment he stumbled across his own Holy Grail. “I was looking after my daughter one morning, and she was playing with some Duplo.” He began idly sorting the figures by component parts, into columns. “Here are all the ones with yellow dresses, here are all the ones with brown eyes...' But, of course, these categories overlap." The first realisation: “What I need here isn’t columns - it's a Venn diagram.”

By the time his daughter was asking for her toys back, Curran had grown attached to his creation. “I needed to quickly record what I'd done, so I just scribbled down the number of figures in each part.” And then, the eureka moment: “Wait. Does this constitute a unique setup? Can I reconstruct from just these instructions?' So I removed the figures, and realised there was just a single solution. 'Oh my god, this is a game'.”