Magnetmen

Magnetmen is a One Paper Game about grabbing as many points as you can, before you’re repelled by everyone.

It is part of my journey towards making games as simple and accessible as humanly possible. This game’s rules are so simple that they are entirely on the paper.

• On your turn, cross out one free square.
• The more you have of a type, the more you’re forbidden from picking adjacent squares ( = the more you’re “repelled” by it).

And yet, while playing, you will notice deeper strategies and the necessity to think multiple moves ahead. If you don’t, you’ll soon get stuck, repelled by everything ;)

What’s special?

A true One Paper Game, with the rules on the board. (Though I did that three times before, this iteration had some slight improvements over the previous attempts.)

The board itself is also simpler than many of my other One Paper Games. Usually, because you play by writing on the board, the map needs many locations on which you can write. This makes the board look more messy or overwhelming than I’d like.

With this game, the board is just an 8x8 grid of squares, each showing one big and clear illustration (of Magnetmen). It makes the game look simple and approachable, which is half the battle in getting people to try something.

The Magnetmen are almost entirely created using generative AI. Their dataset contains tons of (certainly copyright-free) photos of real-life metal objects, magnets, robots, etcetera. This allows it to actually make creatures that look believable from those materials—something I could barely achieve by hand if you gave me half a year to do it.

Also, the entire game was made in 2 days. (Faster isn’t better, but it is something special about this game, hence why I mention it.)