I Made You a Game About Yarn

Here’s a thing I didn’t expect to spend my summer on.

I was sitting in the dentist’s office with my phone, wanting something to do with my hands that wasn’t crochet, because I’d left my project bag at home like an amateur. And every free game I found wanted me to watch an ad about a puzzle that wasn’t in the game, or asked me for four dollars, or was about farming.

So I made one. It’s called Wind Up. It’s free, it’s right here on this page, and it’s about the only thing I think about anyway.

How It Works

You drop notions into a project bag. When two of the same thing touch, they wind together into the next thing up. A stitch marker becomes a button, a button becomes your first rows, and eleven tiers later, if you’ve been very clever and slightly lucky, you get a blanket.

You only ever get handed the first five things. Everything above that you have to make yourself. Which, yes, is also how crochet works.

Bigger things are worth wildly more than small ones, so the whole game is climbing that chain. And the bag fills up whether you’re ready or not.

A few things worth knowing:

• On your phone, drag across the board to line up your drop and lift your finger to let go. There are buttons underneath if you’d rather tap.
• On a computer, arrow keys to move, space to drop, C for the project bag.
• The project bag holds one thing for later. Very useful. Underused by everyone I’ve watched play it, including me.
• Relaxed mode lifts out the small clutter when you overflow and lets you keep going. Classic ends it there. I play Relaxed. I have nothing to prove.

I have not made a blanket

I want to be honest with you about this.

I have gotten to a washcloth many, many times. I have gotten to a scarf. I once got to a beanie and made a noise my husband asked me about from another room.

The blanket is the top of the chain, and it is genuinely hard to reach. If you get one,
I want to hear about it in the Facebook group, and I want a screenshot, because I still
haven’t seen one with my own eyes.

I can’t promise the game will hand you a blanket. I can. Check out the Braided Wheat Blanket.

The game stops at a picture. These don’t.

Petal Loop Stitch Washcloth
Wheat Stitch Hooded Scarf
Block Stitch Beanie

There are eight of these now

Wind Up was the first. It got out of hand.

There’s now Yarn Shuffle, which is a match-three with yarn cakes. Just One More Row, which is exactly what it sounds like and just as hard to stop. Stash Buster, where the blocks fall and you clear rows. Knot Again, a minesweeper made of granny squares. Loose Ends, solitaire with crochet suits. Tangled, a matching game that eats forty minutes without telling you. And Colorwork, where you shoot yarn balls at other yarn balls, which is more satisfying than it has any right to be.

They all live in the app, alongside a growing library of my patterns.

Wind Up is the only one I’ve put on the blog, partly because it’s my favorite and partly because I wanted to see whether anyone would actually play it before I did the work eight more times. So — play it. If you like it, tell me. If you get to a blanket, definitely tell me.

Cheers, and happy crocheting (and gaming).