Starting today: our next Kickstarter campaign!

Today–yes, this very day–we’re launching our next Kickstarter campaign: a book of Endangered Alphabets sudoku.

Here’s the thinking. The entire idea of endangered alphabets is so, um, foreign to most people in the West I have to use every means at my disposal to introduce these remarkable scripts from around the world, and to make it clear why they are vital to their cultures of origin and to the world in general.

One of the ways in which we smuggle endangered alphabets in through the back door, as it were, is by inventing games. You may already own our highly successful word search book; you may know our tabletop game Ulus: Legends of the Nomads; you may have heard of our fabled board game Glagolitic Abbey.

Endangered Alphabets Sudoku will, I predict, be our most successful yet, and takes game nerdiness to a magnificent new level. This book will be a sibling to our Endangered Alphabets Word Search book. It will contain 24 sudoku puzzles, from easy to fiendish in difficulty, that instead of the numbers 1-9 use nine different letters, characters or numbers from threatened scripts from around the world. Each puzzle is accompanied by an introduction to the script, its culture of origin, and what makes it so interesting—and so threatened.

The real challenge, though, is that a new script takes some getting used to. Every unfamiliar character is like a temporary mental road block. But that’s the serious point of the game: that confusion and frustration happen every day, all over the world, when a minority or refugee culture is forced to live in a surrounding culture that uses a different script. Healthcare, legal services, food, banking—everything outside the home is a game of endangered alphabet sudoku.

And this is what I love about it: when I tackle one of the puzzles it takes someone who, by virtue of chance and birth, landed and grew up within the privileged world, and gives me a momentary glimpse of what trying to enter my world must be like for those who, by virtue of chance and their birth, landed and grew up on the outside.

So: please back this campaign, which as you know with Kickstarter is all or nothing. We have a month to reach $15,000, which we have done before and can do again. I’ve lined up some juicy rewards, and as you know I am open to suggestions for others. So please go for it, knowing that someone in your family or friend circle will be amazed and delighted by this book.

All the very best, and thanks for your continuing interest in and support of the Endangered Alphabets Project.

Tim