Game design / computational craft
Inscribe is an area-control game that uses a pysanky egg as the game board. Players write marks onto the egg through layered dye and wax-resist phases, producing a decorated egg that remains as a physical record of gameplay.
Core idea
The project translates pysanky’s traditional process of writing with beeswax, dyeing in layers, and revealing hidden marks into a tabletop game system. The egg is not a decorative afterthought: it is the board, the score trace, the surface of play, and the final object.
Game system
Players claim regions by writing marks onto the curved egg surface and score through clustered connected spaces.
Material process
Gameplay follows iterative dye phases in which marks are hidden, layered, and finally revealed when the wax is removed.
Design argument
The game asserts that tabletop play can happen through unusual material platforms, including fragile, curved, hand-inscribed objects.
Collaboration
Designed with Mitchell Stevens, Keenan Grey, Gillian Smith, and Jennifer deWinter.
Project statement
The project was eventually named Inscribe because pysanky is closely associated with writing: the player’s marks are not merely decorative, but procedural inscriptions that determine gameplay, territorial control, scoring, and the appearance of the final egg.
Each play session produces a unique physical reminder of the game. The completed egg preserves decisions, conflicts, resistances, dye phases, and local variations as a tactile game record.
Rules overview
Curated gallery
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The best completed game egg showing a black, white, yellow, orange, and magenta rule-based game-board design wrapped around the egg surface.
A completed pink, purple, black, and white Inscribe game egg with irregular regions and white boundary lines.
An alternate view of the completed pink Inscribe game egg showing the wrapped surface pattern and game-board segmentation.
Black and white playing space for Inscribe with circles for dye jars, rectangles for cards, and numbered turn counters.
A white egg with pencil guidelines marking an early quadrant division for the game-board design.
A strip of graph paper wrapped around an egg to measure and subdivide the curved surface.
A close view of graph paper and pencil guide marks used to divide the egg surface into measured regions.
A white egg marked with intersecting pencil guidelines and graph paper measurement for surface mapping.
A brightly colored pysanky egg with geometric floral patterning in pink, yellow, purple, black, and white.
A decorated pysanky egg on a stand with teal, black, orange, pink, and blue geometric patterning.
Hands holding a dark stained-glass-like egg near a candle flame.
A dark egg with mosaic-like blue, purple, green, and red stained-glass patterning.
Composite image showing a finished pysanky egg, a wax stylus, graph paper planning, and dyeing process.