ANN ARBOR, MI -- For Hanna and Tavey Lin, winning means having only love.
The pair owns 8Ways Games and designed the board game Tiny Robot Love Doctors, a cooperative puzzle game they liken to a mix between Tetris and Candy Crush. They recently launched a Kickstarter in hopes of getting the game produced and printed.
Hannah and Tavey Lin met in 2019 while playing Dungeons and Dragons at 4Corners, a bar Tavey owned in China. They were visiting friends and family in the United States when the pandemic hit, leaving them trapped.
“My return flight was canceled as I was walking out of the door of my apartment. (Tavey) was actually there — I was giving him my key to water my plants while I was gone,” Hanna said. “And I was walking out the door, I got a notification that my return flight was canceled.”
The pair ended up quarantining together in a studio apartment in Texas, where they developed Tiny Robot Love Doctors. They eloped in 2021 after discovering Hanna was pregnant.
“We did a lot of soul searching, and we realized we both wanted to be parents,” Hanna said. “We spent six months living in a one-room (apartment) together. …It was a whole pressure cooker for our relationship and our business dreams.”
To play Tiny Robot Love Doctors, participants work together to swap tiles representing emotions like greed, gloom and rage with tiles representing love. Players can “delete” the negative emotions from the “Heart Drive” by arranging them in certain shapes. The game is meant for one to four players and is slated for those 14-years-old and older, although Hanna said the game is accessible for those as young as eight.
“If you don’t work together, the game is impossible,” Hanna said.
Playing games focused on cooperation, rather than on sabotage or secrecy, subconsciously affects players, the pair said.
“I want to promote people to start seeing how we can cooperate to win the game,” Hanna said. “We’re working towards mutual goals.”
Tavey agreed.
“There’s something about the last visual of the game because the end result is that the board, the grid is full of the love tokens which have been helping you the whole game,” he said.
The pair launched a Kickstarter in the first week of August to fund production of the game. As of Friday morning, the Kickstarter had reached nearly $3,600 of its $15,000 goal. The Kickstarter closes on Friday, Sept. 2. If the Kickstarter is fully funded, games will arrive to backers by Christmas.
Guaranteeing Christmas delivery means the pair has had to order the prototype before the campaign is fully funded, a risk in the gaming industry.
“We’ll never know if we don’t try. We could delay it a few more months and have a more secure campaign,” Hanna said. “But we’re going for it. We’re tired of delaying things. We’ve been waiting for years to make our lives start again. So we’re not waiting anymore.”
For more information on Tiny Robot Love Doctors or to add to the production fund, find the Kickstarter online.
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