Quarky

Product Design & Entrepreneurship| Solo | 2017

Quarky is a board game company that I started working on back in 2016. I'm currently on hiatus from actively manufacturing and selling to focus on other projects, but still patent pending for some related IP.

Quarky started when I designed "Professor's Chess", a game heavily based on chess that I transposed onto a 5x5x5 Rubik's Cube (often called a "Professor's Cube"). After getting initial interest, and selling some velcro-ed together prototypes, I began pursuing Quarky as a venture.

I built the first prototype for Professor's Chess in high school with my friends Dylan and Miles while working on a school project in 2015.

While Quarky was active, I designed the CAD and rules for around half a dozen games, and 3d-printed, finished, and assembled all of the games myself. Some of the other games I designed were Mobius, a Monopoly-esque game based on a Mobius Strip, Metami, a fractal-inspired battle game, and Hana, an asynchronous stacking game. In addition to game design, Quarky gave me a lot of exposure to branding, marketing, and logistics of running a made-to-order hardware company.

Professor's Chess!
Metami!
Mobius!
First playable prototype for professor's chess!
Prototype for Metami
Early prototype for Mobius

In the end, my decision to take a break from Quarky was largely a result of an earlier decision not to take on initial investment, and to manufacture everything by hand. I really enjoyed my time working on Quarky, and hopefully I'll revisit it again sometime in the near future. You can check out the old website here, learn how to play Professor's Chess here (from back when I was selling the game as Relati5), and .