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

Dear friends and supporters:

We’re launching our latest Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, and I must say, it is surely the timeliest.

Here’s the backstory.

A few months ago, in Katmandu, a type designer named Ananda K. Maharjan ran a workshop in which his students learned a spectacularly beautiful traditional Nepalese script that has largely fallen into disuse, called Ranjana. When the course ended in a final exhibition for the public, Ananda designed a stunning poster that said, in Ranjana, English, and two other languages, “Thank you all.”

As soon as I saw this design online, I was stunned by how beautiful the Ranjana script is, but I was just as stunned by that phrase “Thank you all.”

I thought, At a time when the world seems more divided than ever, this is what we need right now: not suspicion and divisiveness and bigotry but gratitude and openness to everyone, everywhere.

So my plan, which I hope you’ll support, is to create a new exhibition of carvings, my first in four years, consisting of ten large, spectacular carvings, each of which will say “Thank you all” in an endangered indigenous or minority writing system.

But it will go farther than that.

Each of the ten carvings—a number I chose to mark the fact that this show will coincide with the tenth anniversary of the first Endangered Alphabets exhibition—will feature the work of a calligrapher or type designer who is reviving, like Ananda Maharjan, their culture’s traditional endangered script. The exhibition, then, will act as a showcase for their art, and in turn it will show their community and the world that their script is vital, alive, a means of self-expression and a thing of beauty, expressive of their culture and their people.

The Thank You All collection will also have a personal meaning. It’s a way for me to thank the thousands of people all over the world who have encouraged me, offered their expertise and wisdom, sent me photos and translations, and given the financial support needed to build the Endangered Alphabets Project and the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets.

I’m setting a goal of $15,000 and a stretch goal of $20,000. It will take a good six months’ work, the wood itself will cost $1,000-$2,000 as each of the ten pieces will be unique, and I’ll be paying each calligrapher/designer for the right to carve their art.

As usual, we have a wide range of attractive, unusual and suitable rewards, and as usual I’m open to suggestions, even after the Kickstarter is in progress, of other rewards to add!

So please support us with a contribution, no matter how large or small, at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/endangeredatlas/thank-you-all

Thank you.

Thank you all.

Tim