Reinventing The Great Pen Challenge: New & Improved

Ever since I published my new book, Cross-Referencing Creativity: A Practical Guide for Transferring Skills from One Context to Another, I’ve been thinking about all the things I’ve done since I started documenting this journey.

Take vibe coding, for example.

The first thing I vibe coded for this blog was The Great Pen Challenge, a card game consisting of 20 challenges that we sometimes play in PREXcoaching® team sessions. The challenges aim at reinventing a single pen through a prism of different skills and are primarily designed for teams as a team-building activity.

My original idea was to showcase the games, i.e., challenges, but if you take a closer look, you can see that the execution was not really top-notch.

At the time, I couldn’t see what was wrong with it, because that was the first time I had ever managed to produce a fully functional game demo. OK, the “fully” part may be subject to debate, but in the context of early 2024, this was peak achievement, and I will only accept it as such.

But let’s face it – the game title and post title are both H1, the “cards” flash like crazy, and they change size in an equally frantic manner. This makes it really difficult to stop them unless you’re aiming somewhere around the title, which is seemingly fixed. This, in turn, does not make it really user-friendly. Well, you get the idea.

Anyway, I decided to give this game set a new spin, so to speak. I put the “cards” into actual cards this time, which makes the playing experience more user-friendly and familiar to actual players.

You may notice that the design does not follow the standard theme fonts here, but that’s because I’m testing out things for the new blog version. One of the things I’d like to do is to have a unified game design, so I am aware of this fact, and this was done on purpose. Other than that, I think it looks pretty good.

The rules remain the same: Click on the card below to draw your daily challenge, and then have fun playing with your team.

Let me know which challenge you like the most!