About This Project

Crystal Word Chain is a simple game where you create a chain of pairs of words. It's not particularly challenging usually, but it is fun. We started it as a game to pass the time on a long drive to Oregon where my companion was going to start her career as a music teacher.

The original version was just "Word Chain". It was a single string of words and the goal was to get back to the seed word and make a loop. So, as a very short loop you might have road > side > road where "roadside" and "side road" are all you need to complete the loop. Later, we thought it would be interesting to make it more challenging by making it 2-dimensional and Crystal Word Chain was born.

As I thought about it more, I realized that we could try to make more meaningful connection between words and concepts. I had heard of the Glass Beads Game from Hermann Hesse's novel of the same name, and I thought it would be interesting to see if we could create a similar game using the same game boards.

So, there are two ways to play the Crystal games:

• Crystal Word Chain, where you connect words in interesting ways.
• Crystal Connections, where you try to make more complex connections between ideas and concepts as they are represented by words.

Both games are fun and interesting to play, and they are also open artifacts projects. You can create your own versions of the game, modify the rules, or create new game boards. The goal is to encourage creativity and exploration through word play and idea connection.