creomondi is an infinite Creativity multi-trainer. Its goal: to inspire and help you practice your Creativity Operating System — the seven core skills that make us all creative.
creomondi is designed for infinite play. With billions of surprising game sets, you can play with creomondi every day, several times a day. Each time you play, you will use your creative muscles and make them stronger and more flexible. Playing creomondi will spice-up your day with playfulness and imagination, which are essential to your productiveness, motivation, and wellbeing.
This short guide will help you get familiar with the building blocks from which a creomondi set is made and how to use them. As you will see, this is just the starting point. The real power of creomondi is that you can take it as far as your imagination goes.
The creomondi Building Blocks
A play of creomondi starts with a set of cards: a Playground, one or more Seeds, and an Insight Type. If you wish to further spice up the game, you can add a Constraint card to the set.
Let's see how each of these building blocks is used in the game.
The Playground
As you can guess, the Playground defines where we play. Some playgrounds are physical places like a street or an unfamiliar room. Other Playgrounds are conceptual or virtual, like a family album or Wikipedia.
The Playground is where we look for inspiration. Whatever the Playground is, explore it mindfully. Observe it with all your senses. You are not looking for anything specific. You are looking for the spark of an idea — some ingredients that you will later use to create something. The actual creation will not necessarily happen in the Playground. The Playground is just our source of inspiration.
To help us in our creative exploration, we are using one or more Seeds.
The Seed
A Seed is basically a word or a phrase. As simple as this may sound, a Seed helps us in our creative exploration by focusing our attention and imagination on things we tend to ignore, or on a new interpretation of things we take for granted. In that sense, a Seed is like a magical lens that makes us see the world differently.
The way we use a Seed is open by itself. All you need to do is to keep the Seed in mind, but avoid overthinking it. As you explore the Playground, look for things you can associate with the Seed or fuse with it. Let your imagination lead the way, and don't dismiss anything, even if the connection to the Seed seems strange or far-fetched.
As you explore the Playground and you gain some discoveries, take notes or take some photos so you can remember them vividly later and use them for your creation.
seempli Pro members can add a second Seed to the game. When playing with two Seeds, the combinations you get might are even stranger and more enigmatic. In turn, they will lead you to an even wider creative space.
The Insight
Now, with some discoveries from your creative exploration, it is time to create something. And that's where the Insight card comes into play.
The Insight card defines what it is we are going to create. From a story or a collage to a breakfast or a themed day — the insight we are about to create is where we take what we observed, associated, and fused, and use it as raw material to create something imaginative and new.
We are not aiming for a masterpiece. The point of the game is not to create something perfect, but rather to experience and be engaged in the creative flow. The only guideline is that we use what we discovered, or the Seeds, or both as inspiration for our creation. You will soon realize that this is not a limitation, but rather the key to coming up with surprising and imaginative results.
The Constraint
To make the game even more challenging, you can add a Constraint card. When adding a Constraint, you must apply it in your creation or during the exploration.
Some constraints might seem trivial for some Insight Types. Some might seem strange and enigmatic. Coming up with a creative way to apply the Constraint is part of the game.
Putting it all Together
Now that we understand how to use the different creomondi building blocks, let's walk through an example to see how everything fits together to form a creative experience.
Before we do that, keep mind that the beauty of the game is that it is genuinely open. You can take a creomondi set and play with it differently. You can take it as far as your imagination goes. The following example is a guide to the default creomondi gameplay.
So, here's the set we played with:
Our Playground in this set was A Street, and so the first thing we did, was to go out for a short walk. Note that even if you play again with the same Playground card, you can choose a different street to explore. Playground cards define only the type of the Playground, which means they are yet another open dimension of the game.
We took with us the Maze Seed. We observed the things around us mindfully while keeping the word Maze in mind. As a result, a few things caught our eyes, and we took some photos to use later in the creation step.
The connection to the concept of a Maze can be obvious or purely associative. It doesn't matter. During the creative exploration, our sole goal is to have as many such discoveries as possible, so we will have many ingredients to play with and use as inspiration later.
When we got back home, we took some time between other tasks to create a 50-Word Story, as defined by the Insight card. To do that, we revisited the photos and notes we took during our exploration. We used them as inspiration, but again in a very associative way. We let our imagination lead us. And this is the story we came up with:
The scenery was hypnotizing. From above, the rocky terrain looked like an infinite maze. There was no place to land in sight. As the sun set and the shadows grew longer, the labyrinth became alive. He activated the auto-pilot, closed his eyes, and imagined she was holding his hand.
As you can see, the story is derived from one of the photos we took. We found this stone which was part of a wall, and when we revisited it, it looked like a rocky terrain from above. In this example, the word Maze appears explicitly in our creation, but this is not required, of course. As long as you are using something you have discovered and the Seed as an inspiration, any result is perfect.
Without the Seed, we probably would have missed this discovery, and without this discovery, we wouldn't have come up with this idea for our ultra-short story.
This is the magic of creomondi. And every time you play with it, it becomes more surprising.
