Chaos Cupcakes is a “real-time” game about matching icons, colors, shapes, and more. It means that there are no turns, or rounds, or anything of the sort. Everyone is allowed to move at the same time, and the only move you’re doing is a simple educational one: if you see another tile with the same icon as one of yours, quickly place your tile on top of it!
Players will be scanning the table, looking for matches everywhere, and reacting quickly. The base game is as simple as that—you already know the rules now. But Upgrades add special rules and more possible matches, which allows you to also practice (simple) math and language skills.
One of the few downsides of real-time (“chaotic”) games like this, is that there will be (accidental) cheating. Everyone’s moving at the same time. You can’t “check” all that’s going on, that’s just a fact. That’s why we decided to make “cheating” an actual part of the game! By recognizing it happens and actually using it, it stops being a problem and you’re left with a fast and fun game without waiting on your turn.
Moreover, the base game is cooperative. You work together to solve this puzzle of getting rid of all your cards by placing them on top of matches. The faster you do this, with the fewest mistakes, the better. This is a great way to get started and to learn cooperation.
The game truly shines, though, when made competitive. When you want to be the first to get rid of all your cards. If you enable that Upgrade, you’ll find the game turns into a quick, hilarious party game for the whole family.
That’s the general flow of our games, in case you had not noticed yet. A cooperative version is a nice friendly way to get started and to actually teach/practice the skills required. But once all players HAVE those (matching) skills, you can play the competitive version and use that as an actual test/challenge of the skill (and possibly a bit more tense and fun).
As such, if you’re looking for a “final test” for Level 1 skills such as Visual Discrimination, this is the game! The speed, the chaos, and the challenge are a nice way to cap off Level 1 and let players realize how far they’ve come.
We chose the current size of the cupcakes because making them any larger would dramatically increase the amount of pages and ink needed to print it. We also made them octagonal, instead of round, to be easier to cut and more resilient to mistakes.
If you want them bigger and circular, contact us. If there’s enough interest, we’ll add a second PDF with a larger version of the entire game for free!
For reference, Dobble cards are ~8cm and our cards are ~6cm tall/wide. But our cards only have 6 icons at most and Dobble cards always have 8.
Product Contents
Below is a summary of this product's contents. The actual product might have even more inside, but never less.
- Rulebook PDF (1 front page with information and story, 1 page base game, 2 pages with upgrades)
- Material PDF (4 pages with base game cupcakes, 3 pages with upgrade cupcakes/material)
- The raw assets (illustrations, layout file, etc) for you to view/edit. (As
.affiles, which you can open with the free Affinity software.)
External Enchantments
We try to share the love and improve education, not be greedy goblins, which is why we share source files and link related work of others when possible. Check out the list below of what went into this project or what inspired it. If possible, support those people too!
| Link | Explanation |
| Dobble / Spot It | Ah, the classic. It’s the same idea, and the cards even look similar in overall design, but with less of a game around it. It’s more of a competitive challenge/activity that you can easily bring anywhere. |
| Anarchy Pancakes | This game clearly inspired the core mechanic for Chaos Cupcakes. We simplified the idea, added more eductional topics and skills, added a cooperative/friendlier version to start with, and then used our optional upgrades to actually get a much more advanced game if you want. |