wonderingment
I like this wonder room idea where you essentially have things on display in your home that lead to tricks. You can read up more on it here and here from Jerx.
Here are two cool things with some potential that I found recently on kickstarter:
Author Clock - a new kind of book test
I really like untraditional clocks. I have this City Clock from a few years ago when it launched on Kickstarter because I didn’t have any clocks in my apartment and wanted to be able to tell time secretly without having to peek at a watch or phone. Although the Author Clock isn’t sneaky by any means, it quotes a random authors’ published work that mentions the time every minute.
So there’s something here with time, a book test, and the clock. The clock isn’t connected to the internet, so there will be a finite amount of quotes. They’re asking backers to post quotes for them so they can add as many as possible before shipping. If you can hack it and know which one is coming up, you can use the clock as kicker ending reveal. Or you have an envelope sitting behind the clock, and whenever someone asks about it, they open it to find a page ripped out from a book, and the highlighted passage matches what’s on the clock.
Moku Tower - a cool game with build-in predictions
Between the Author Clock and this, I chose to back this one. It’s more self contained.
It’s a game based on the rock balancing thing that you’ve seen all over the internet. The basics idea is to stack these wooden blocks according to what cards you draw while being timed by an hourglass. There’s more nuance to it. Instructions are on the kickstarter page. But this is cool because they’ve essentially printed the prediction cards for you. It’ll just be a matter of figuring out a prediction system.
You can even use the box cover itself as the prediction. And the structure doesn’t have to live in the box, you can leave it out as decoration. It looks pretty neat.
Also, apparently rock balancing is bad for the environment. So any time you have people over and conversations shift to environment, you have a pretty easy in. I’m excited to get this one.
If you’re interested in stuff like this but want a more magic-centric product, I can recommend all of Phil Smith’s stuff. I recently bought this psychic game that looks like something you’d find at a thrift store.