Raphael Kabo

Over the last year, I’ve been really enjoying learning React, and I’ve recently used all the fun new skills I’ve learned to code two online card games, both about imagining and exploring utopian spaces and communities, but in very different ways. Both started life as physical games, but have become virtual because of the Covid-19 lockdown.

Loving Allness is a game designed by Sinjin Li which exists as a beautiful physical game with various permutations of rules, and now can also be played online. It is a game about travelling between worlds, creating meanings, and rearranging tiles. It helps tell stories about what we want to take with us, and what we want to leave behind, when we change where we are and what things mean. I refined and simplified some of the rules to make it easier to code, but this was still a serious coding challenge, requiring me to push react-beautiful-dnd to the limits of its capabilities to permit me to rearrange tiles between multiple lists while changing their ownership between different players.

We Have the Square is a game co-designed by me and my utopian collaborator Katie Stone in our combined existence as Utopian Acts. It is a collaborative storytelling game inspired by occupation protest movements, asking players to think through the victories and challenges of creating an oppositional utopian community. While Loving Allness is poetic and evocative, We Have the Square is more open-ended, playing less like a game and more like a storytelling exercise.

Get some friends together and play both of them!