Endangered Alphabets….sudoku?

As you may already have realized, I love creating Endangered Alphabets games, and in particular I like creating games that are unusual, fun, and challenging, and also involve and even require the player(s) to learn and/or use the letters and characters of unfamiliar and threatened cultures. No, not Cthulhu. Real people in real jeopardy.

My approach has three virtues: (a) it means the games themselves are in some way new and unusual; (b) it adds a layer of challenge, and frankly, gamers nowadays really like a challenge; and (c) it puts the player in the same position as a refugee, immigrant or minoritized person, trying to make sense of strange and even baffling signs and symbols. My games have you walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.

So when I discovered in 2019 that the Heritage Made Digital team of the British Library was taking the relatively unfamiliar scripts of some of the documents they were digitizing–Javanese, Egyptian, Ethiopic–and using nine characters from those scripts instead of the nine numbers of a regular sudoku, I saw an idea of genius (theirs) and a way to adapt it to the Endangered Alphabets.

Four years of trial and error later, I give you our latest Kickstarter campaign, at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/endangeredatlas/endangered-alphabets-sudoku.

Check it out!

Tim