Kevin Rose Kicked My Ass in Blockles

Last Thursday I got home from work to see @kevinrose had tweeted a link to a game called Blockles on iminlikewithyou.  I’d used iminlikewithyou over a year ago when Andrew Mager and iJustine started using it.  The site started out as a “dating” site where you made little games and bid on people for fun.  Eventually iminlikewithyou (or iilwy for short) started making small casual games, and Blockles is one of these games.

Blockles is probably most easily classified as a casual game but it offers a unique and very interesting twist from some better known casual games such as Bejeweled and the other PopCap fare.  Based on Tetris, Blockles features the use of items and introduces a social dynamic to the game.  While many people are familiar with the rules of Tetris from time spent playing it on their NES, Game Boy, or computer, I don’t think anybody is prepared for the social dynamics that drastically change the Tetris style gameplay the first time you play Blockles.

The view while waiting to play Blockles.  This image shows the screens of the seven players currently playing.  To the right the chat window is visible.

After watching for about ten minutes (Kevin is a popular guy on the internets), one of the eight spots in the game opened up and I was able to play.  I started off making as many lines as possible and got off to a quick lead.  About a minute in to the game six players’ screens had already filled with blocks and I had such a big lead over the only other remaining player I was sure to win.  Three second later, my screen filled with blocks almost instantly, and I lost.  I stared at the screen befuddled, wondering how my nearly flawless play had resulted in defeat.

When your screen fills and you lose a round of Blockles you’re given items that can be used on the remaining players to effect the outcome of the game.  The use of Blockles items allows players to either help or hinder another player’s progress, by removing lines from, adding lines to, scrambling, or otherwise manipulating opponents’ screens.

After I recovered from my loss, I scrolled back through the chat window to see what had been said during the last moments of play and found this line:

“Kevin Rose: everyone drop your extra items on campo”.

In this chat window the crowd of players determined that I would lose this round of Blockles.

Kevin used the chat window to encourage all the previously eliminated players to add lines to my screen and as a result I was quickly overwhelmed with more lines than I could handle.  This gameplay dynamic demonstrates how iilwy is pioneering games in the social space and how Kevin Rose kicked my ass in Blockles.  The amazing part is that he’d already lost.