July 21, 2020

Moon Spinner: A Stellar Product

At ThinkFun, we’re always looking for brainteasers that are out-of-this-world, so it was incredibly exciting when we found one that hit the metaphor right on the nose! Invented by the world-famous puzzle designer Oskar van Deventer, “Moonshine,” as Moon Spinner™ was originally known, was a multi-colored celestial puzzle that was a sight to behold. The way the puzzle shifted was also otherworldly, with its pieces rotating on an artistic flat surface.

Having worked with Oskar previously on a number of ThinkFun products including Fidgitz, our Product Development team was excited to work with him again. Creating puzzles since the age of 12, Oskar has now invented hundreds of different puzzle designs. He has also won several international awards in Mobile Gaming, has made over 800 standardization contributions, and co-authored the book Fundamentals of Bidirectional Transmission over a Single Optical Fibre and over 150 publications. It was important to us that his latest creation could be enjoyed by people all over globe, so we focused on its wide-ranging visual appeal and less on explaining it through text.

While changing the name from “Moonshine” to “Moon Spinner” was easy, the most challenging part of development was explaining how the puzzle worked without words! During playtesting, it became clear that many people thought the puzzle was supposed to be solved by separating Moon Spinner into pieces, rather than twisting and rotating the pieces within the frame. Thanks to our superstar Art Department, we were able to come up with instructional visuals that could be understood around the world.

Creating a product package without language was a fun brainteaser for our team and it paid off. Moon Spinner is not only a game that can be understood worldwide, it can also be taken anywhere and is completely waterproof! The stars really aligned for us with this game and we’re over the moon… and while there are more celestial puns we could make, we’ll hold off for now.

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