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Overview & How to Use

This isn’t quite a board game, or a card game, rather its just a bunch of tech that is play-able on a table… and its has not one, but multiple games!

Blinks is a game system with all sorts of tactile fun with flashing LED lights and magnets. It gets a modern twist from the fact that all of the hexagons can talk to each other. Each of the hexes is an individual ‘blink’ with LED lights, at its core it’s just a hex with lights and a button on top. However, a blink is capable of talking to other blinks once connected to them thanks to its magnetic sides, So pushing a button here can make that other one light up and vice-versa. Connecting a whole ton of them together allows for basically endless permutations of games!

When you flip any of the Blinks over, they each have distinct games on the back, meaning yes, save data within each hex to play. Each Blink can teach all other Blinks you connect to it to play its own game. Just take a single blink with its own game, press, hold, and release the button, and teach all the connected Blinks to play it! And you can do this with a lot of Blinks, depending on the game… so you can start to see how the potential for this game system starts to skyrocket.

Games Featured

There’s all sorts of different games here too. We got to try 12 of them, where 6 games are included in each box of Blinks.

Real-time games are a great to jump start interest, with a simple wack-a-mole game called “Wham!” lets you mash buttons and see if you can last 30 waves of moles getting into your garden. Or there’s “Speed Racer”, where you have to quickly build a road for a car that is going to crash unless you stack new hexes in front of it.

There’s a party game called “Bomb Brigade”, where players take turn striking a central bomb by pressing it to make it spin faster and faster. If it explodes on your turn in a direction without a shield, you’re out of the game!

Another cool one is called Mortals, where 2 players will each take half of the Blinks in a battle to survive. On a player’s turn, they will remove one of their survivors from this cluster, and place it somewhere new. Whoever they touch, including their own team, they’ll steal 5 seconds of life from. Wait 5 seconds? Yep, Mortals is going to be played with a timer element, with 60 seconds of life for each blink piece, as players alternate taking turns. And then when any tile dies, it becomes a zombie, accelerating the death of all its surrounding tiles. 

You can even play a type of shuffleboarding with one mode called “Flic Flop”, sending the Blinks across the table to magnetically connect with others… where there’s a timing element with the LEDs. Shuffleboarding with timed, blinking pieces, man it sounds like a Mario Party mini game come to life.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately for both Blinks and VR though, they’re preeeetty expensive when compared to other gaming equivalents you can buy; so like normal cardboard tabletop games and video game consoles. Unlike with VR though, your investment in Blinks will continue to improve as they keep coming out with more and more games, and the more blinks you buy the crazier the games you already own will be. With VR, not only is there sometimes weird exclusivity nonsense going on between Oculus and Vive but you also gotta upgrade your hardware as VR keeps improving its peripherals and graphics.

We can’t really definitively score this because the Blinks game system is always growing and there’s just so many games, but we do highly recommend trying at least 12 or more blinks for many of the games. So if you are going to buy some Blinks, this is definitely more of a go big or go home kinda purchase, because only having 6 blinks is soooooo limiting.

We take Blinks as a great sign that there will be more app integration in games come in the future, and the pure accessibility in starting Blinks has been such a breath of fresh air. Again, this is technically an abstract tabletop game, but a really unorthodox one at that.