The seeds for iUnga go all the way back to my childhood. The themes of motion and flow have fascinated me for a long time, and now I have finally managed to bring them into a game.
It’s been a long time coming: when I was a child I played the little game with blocks that you see in the video. A simple game but strangely satisfying in a meditative kind of way: a gap moving backwards step by step, blocks moving forwards one at a time and if I played it long enough, they all returned to the place where they had started….
A few years ago, we visited St. Peter’s in Rome. The line for security circled most of the way around St. Peter’s Square. As we waited in line, we could see people across the circle move up when there was room; the gap in the line moved backwards, the people moved forwards just like in my childhood game. And I started to wonder: could this standing-in-line mechanism be incorporated into a board game?