Reddit reviews Creative Whack Pack

*App Pillows
*Moleskine Notebooks
*Creative Whack Pack Cards
*Visual Brainstorms
*Rubik's Cube notepad
*Computer window memo pad/mouse pad
*Phone stand

If you can't draw, who drew that awesome map?

Moving on:

Things I have tried:

• Reverse my approach - If I began top down, maybe with the cosmology, I'll switch to a single town.
  
• Focus on a side character - Maybe the main character was going no where, now enter a foil, or a guide, or even just a companion.
  
• Exercises from Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
  
• Make a mind map - I use FreeMind.
  Currently my map consists of:
  Physical Environment
  Cosmology
  Races
  Society
  
  Things I'd like to try:
  
  
• Review the tropes associated with the area in question - Start with the most common and/or fundamental/far-reaching ones and maybe dive into the less well known/more specific ones; then subvert them.
  
• The Creative Whack Pack
  
• A game of Dawn of Worlds, Microscope, or Kingdom depending on the area I was stuck on

Yeah, they are gimmicky. But they're fun, and fine for a casual secret santa gift.

Here are a couple other things I routinely give to people I don't know well, but feel obligated to buy a present for:

Caffeine for the Creative Mind

Creative Whack Pack

Just look for something fun and kind of interesting. So long as you don't buy her a vibrator or clothes you'll probably stay out of jail.

This may seem a little crazy, but I use this deck of cards a fair bit. https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Whack-Pack-Roger-Oech/dp/0880793589

A similar exercise is to accumulate a set of photos with no text or explanation - people, nature-scapes, microscopic photos, machines, etc. A wide variety. Print them all the same size. Shuffle them, lay out three or four of them and think about how those pictures apply to your current problem.

Functionally, this is a bit like the Forer Effect used in a positive way. It provides a touchstone that expand your own thinking about a problem in a way that can take you in new directions because of the entropy this injects to kind of move your mind out of local minimums. There is actually a name for how the psychological phenomenon that comes into play, but I can't recall it atm.

I've found it is more effective than just a whitespace brainstorming exercise, but I'm sure it depends quite a lot on the person using it.

I pick a problem that bugs me and then come up with potential solutions, some times I use a card deck based on the book " A whack on the side of the head" card deck