🎲 What is Blackout Island?

Some years ago (2013 to be exact) I made a Survivor-inspired drinking boardgame called Blackout Island. My initial goal was to combine fun drinking games like Waterfall, Categories, and Kings into Survivor, to create an elimination style boardgame for parties. Back then I was still idealistic and niave about the perils of production; the cost to effectively print the game and all necessary assets to play was well over $40, which made selling copies of it $60 and above (expensive!).

That said, I still have all these assets created and laying around in old art harddrives collecting dust. I thought this was a shame, and so this year I decided to release all the assets for free to anyone with the grit, know-how, and brazen audacity to create their own version. You also need like $30 to print everything!

🖨️ Download and Create!

Attached here is a link to the GoogleDrive file of all the Blackout Island game assets, to make your own version at home. If you have any questions (or whoever you decide to print this with has questions) I am happy to answer those questions in the comments section below this post.

For context, here is how I printed stuff previously, and it averaged about $30 – $50 for everything:

THE “BOARD”: BlackoutBack and FullBoard (filenames) are the gameboard (back and front). Originally I had this printed on Banner Material (without grommets!) since the material is waterproof and people can’t spill drinks on it, and it also rolls up like a treasure map for transport! Example here!

CARDS: Two Folders with Reward Cards and Challenge Cards (and backs). These are Business Card size (3.5 X 2 inches), and you will need to explain this to any printer you go through (impossible to get unique fronts added to business cards with online printers like Vistaprint, from what I have found). A good print person will know how to do this if you explain it.  I haven’t read the challenge cards in a while but some of the challenges might require household items (like a roll of toilet paper or a cell phone or tampon or something).

RULES: (Constitution): This is standard paper size, two pages (one for rules and one for amendments. You will want to make Amendments!).

PIECES FOR THE GAME ITSELF: Dice (D6’s) and game pieces for players you will need to gather yourself. For gamepieces, the more demeaning the better. I used these farm animals way back when I sold a few copies of the game to some college kids online: 

🥳 Ready to Play!?

Please send me any images, videos, etc. if you decide to print this and play it. I had one group of people who played it back in 2013 and it sounds like someone got hurt playing the touch-the-ceiling challenge, so if you do play and do choose to drink alcoholic beverages with it, have a sober referee (or two) to monitor and help people navigate the game. I feel like I created something evil, in that it is really fun but can hurt people, so beware of that if you end up printing this and playing!

If you’d like to say thank you, consider purchasing the Blackout Island Gameboard as an autographed art print, purchasing another print from our print shop, or sharing this page on social media (FB, Twitter, Reddit, or TikTok).