Sunday, May 19, 2024
I’ve followed Hank Green on YouTube for years, so when he recommended a word game the other day, I got my phone out and installed it immediately.
Gubbins is a word game that could be called ‘Scrabble-adjacent.’ Words can be built vertically or horizontally with a random selection of letter tiles. Unlike Scrabble, when a word is found, it can be selected and removed. In Britain, a ‘gubbin’ is a miscellaneous item. Gubbins are “weird little pals” who either help you or hinder your puzzle solving. Rainbows with six eyes, mushrooms with eyes and legs, lightning bolts with muscular arms, trumpets with four legs and arms, all done in a retro style that looks like a combination of Peter Max posters and cartoon characters from the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. When your game is over, you can make postcards with the words you’ve used that day in the puzzles, plus cute little stickers and backgrounds.
Created by Studio Folly, Gubbins began as a small game that Darcy Smith and his partner, Jess Shipard created together. In a post on Reddit, Smith says he was working with game devs back in 2020, but when the pandemic hit, opportunities dried up. Shipard suggested “why don’t we try and make something small?”
Shipard is a graphic designer, so already had that design sensibility, and Smith had the digital skills, so after the success of Scrabble and Words with Friends, they decided that a word game would be a good project to collaborate on.
Their focus was simple – create a game that’s fun for non-gamers, no time-sensitive dexterity inputs, and a concentration on quality rather than making a large game. At that time there was very little innovation in word games, so it seemed like the perfect project.
In 2021 Wordle came out and was very popular, and its success confirmed that there was still plenty of appetite for a word game. But designing and developing a game can be highly stressful, and they ran out of money several times. Much of their funding came from games production and development grants from Vicscreen, the primary games funding body in the state of Victoria, Australia. More was made available from Screen Australia, the country-wide games funding body.
But money was still tight and it was difficult to convince game publishers to take risks on new games, especially ones without a lot of funding.
Then Hank Green came along.
After Smith posted a Tik Tok video about Gubbins (mainly to test out his new microphone) Hank Green contacted him and wanted to know more about the game. He offered to purchase 10% of Gubbins, and in exchange 10% of the profits would go towards reducing child and maternal death in Sierra Leone via Partners in Health. Smith and Shipard were thrilled with the offer and took him up on it immediately. It gave them the funds to get the game up on the App Store.
Gubbins is super simple to play and addictive. Players can play one free game a day. There are in-game purchases, but no advertising. For only $5.99, you can play as many times as you want, without limits.
If you like Wordle and other online word games, you’ll love Gubbins. Download “Gubbins – A Word Game” on your phone’s App store today.
