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Candy Crusher is a two-player strategy board game which involves crushing actual candy with actual hammers. Players compete to make the longest rows of their own candies, swapping candies or crushing them to fix them in place. Candy Crusher has been played at the IndieCade East 2015 Show & Tell and Come Out & Play with Your Food at the Tribeca Film Festival 2015.

Candy Crusher was loosely inspired by the popular digital game Candy Crush Saga with a single idea: What if you could play a game where you actually crushed candy with real hammers? This seemed like a fun and funny idea, but we didn’t want it to be just a gimmick, but a real game that was actually interesting and fun to play. (At the time we conceived of it, we were unaware that there was a TV commercial that spoofed this idea.) Our projects typically begin with a high concept, followed by an exploratory “R&D” phase where we play with the affordances of the media and materials we want to use. In this case, we began by smashing a variety of different candies with different hammers on different surfaces to determine the best combinations for the game. Then we experimented with different game mechanics loosely conceived around the idea of creating rows of candy. Finally, we went through at tuning phase where we tried different grid configurations.

The first playtest took place as part of the Show & Tell at IndieCade East 2015. Our initial idea was that the end product of each game would be an artwork, but this idea was scrapped due to the messiness of the game and player disinterest in this aspect of the game. For upcoming events, we plan to photograph the post-game boards and post them on our web site. Further modifications of the game were made as a result of player feedback, including tweaks to the grid size, to arrive at the current version of the game. The second iteration of the game was presented at Come Out & Play with Your Food at the Tribeca Film Festival in April of 2015.