mana worm

Color Jam is a beautifully designed game by Joe Kell, Gene Koo, and Erin Laue. It has a clear vision conveyed without any need to modulate or compromise itself. This is a coloring book game about making art within restrictions. With a couple pieces of printer paper and some crayons, you get to make really cool art.

I have some examples. Behold, Earth Man:

He is an astronaut who, contrary to his profession, loves nothing more than Earth. It’s his favorite place to be. This is evidenced, I would argue, by his Earth-themed astronaut attire and the wall of mud in his wake. His spacefaring pants are blue like the Earth’s beautiful oceans but appear to be fading along the thigh indicating they may, in fact, be denim jeans. I’ve giggled about Earth Man every day since I made him–the unmitigated fashion disaster that is his suit, the futility of trying to make deep-space a deep-green, his American football shaped-and-colored rocket ship–all of it. It’s so bad and yet so good. I hope he tickles your brain like he does mine.

There are only a few steps separating anyone from playing a game of Color Jam. First, print out a few of the provided neat, elaborate, chunky coloring book pages. Grab six markers/crayons/etc. (in my case, always chosen randomly because I love a challenge) and arrange them in a row numbered one through six. Each space on the sheet is numbered one through four, and whenever you use a color that utensil gets pushed to the “six” spot. Spaces can only be colored if they are adjacent to an already filled-in spot. Repeat until finished.

Beyond these sparse rules (economically printed in their entirety along each sheet) any other objectives are self-imposed. A lot of the delight is in simply coloring; it’s fun using a nice marker or picking up a crayon for the first time in ten years and working along some pronounced, thick black borders. There is a puzzle here though, and a very rewarding one.

Say, for instance, I want the horse to be brown, the sky blue, the waterfall also blue, and the grass green. I’m asking a lot, I know. The sheet is designed in such a way that each of these components is itself broken into several different-numbered segments. In order to accomplish these surprisingly lofty goals, I need to cycle through markers efficiently, very often, and make no mistakes.

It doesn’t often go down like that. Maybe the horse can be brown but only if the waterfall ends up tricolored. Perhaps the sky, far from a solid blue or even a sallow grey, will instead be alight with magic or the aurora borealis.

If I do really well at the sequencing puzzle, I can probably make most of the drawing exactly as I envisioned at the start. I can shade in big, chunky pieces of the page to gain access to more of the image. I can deliberately shift and move colors to the right place all in pursuit of the most mono-colored horse and bridge and waterfall to ever exist.

This isn’t to overstate the difficulty of this puzzle. Color Jam isn’t half as crunchy as the average combo-y print-and-play sheet. The decision space is creative and interesting but has very few moving parts. It’s easy enough to plan out a few turns in advance if that’s your type of thing. Figuring out what to do next sometimes requires pausing to reconsider, but the game never bogs down or get complicated.

Then comes the second, brilliant part of the puzzle. Now I have to decide why this is tuft of grass won’t be green, why this rock isn’t like the others, and what happened to the sky? What’s this butterfly’s story, and why’s it the same color as this strange tree? Is this a puff of smoke or a ghostly wisp? What importance did I assign to the horse being brown, and is it so wrong for it to instead be wearing a shirt? Suddenly, Color Jam is a worldbuilding game and each mistake is an opportunity. My inevitable shortcomings at the sequencing puzzle lead me to bold and interesting decisions I never would have made on my own.

Color Jam captures the grade school feeling of having half a carton of unsharpened colored pencils (the rest lost to god knows where) but infinite imagination to make up for it. I’ve played many games about drawing and ink and paint but Color Jam is my favorite. This is a coloring game where you color; an art game where you make art. That means something to me!

I’m sentimental about art nowadays. In a world full of shitty AI art, humans making anything, good or bad or whatever, is the coolest thing. I’m proud of my “happy little accidents” and the creative solutions cobbled together in response. The amalgamated theft machine doesn’t make those sorts of fun mistakes and therefore doesn’t give its users the resultant revelations through overcoming them–it doesn’t make art. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Color Jam is a machine that turns printer paper into a wellspring of creativity.

In conclusion: I love Earth Man. I love the inexplicable brown wake, my shirt-wearing horse, the four-colored disco floor, skies full of rainbow clouds, jagged edges, abandoned plans, nice tries, alcohol markers bleeding through pages and out over borders. At time of writing, I have another ten sheets printing and those, too, will be a good time even when I inevitably mess up. It’s a great time, folks.