available in: Ukrainian English in development

Reframe: A Puzzle of Balance

30 m | 1-2 players | 10+ age

Have you ever experienced a moment when thoughts swirl around in your head like startled birds? One thought latches onto another, changes it, and that one, in turn, leads to others that previously seemed completely unimportant? At such moments, it can be difficult to find that inner balance that will help you sort through everything that’s troubling you right now.


Balance is the puzzle.

Reframe is a card-based puzzle in which you have to settle Experiences that constantly affect one another and change your understanding of them. Your goal is to arrange a sequence of Experience cards so that none of their triggers activate.

Sounds easy? There are only 18 Experience cards, but they form more than 40 000 unique puzzles, and each can be a real challenge.

During the Reflective Phase, you deliberately work with your Experiences: you can Reframe, Reposition, or Reprioritise them. Then comes the Automatic Phase, triggering a Cascade of automatic reactions. You check each Experience’s trigger in sequence and resolve its Effects, leading to the system restructuring itself with (almost) no intervention from you.

Within a limited number of Cascades, you must move every Experience from an Unsettled to a Settled state and create a stable configuration in which no triggers activate.

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Reframe: A Puzzle of Balance is being developed in collaboration with NeuroPlay Lab, a research lab at the University of Plymouth (UK), led by psychologists Dr Gray Atherton and Dr Liam Cross.

Their research explores cognition and neurodiversity in the field of board games.