Ostfriesland Games

A love letter to East Frisia, in pixels

In East Frisia, you can play a sport by rolling a ball along the road, leap over ditches with a long pole, and spend quite a lot of time on tea. For us, that seemed like a good starting point for a video game.

Ostfriesland Games is a small collection of five events in the tradition of Summer Games and Hyper Olympics. It is about timing, rhythm and skill. And that moment when you were about to stop, but have just worked out how to do better.

What you play

In ditch vaulting (Pultstockspringen), you need to time your leap across the ditch just right. In road bowling (Boßeln), you send your ball down the road and deal with whatever gets in the way. In mudflat sled racing, you keep your sled moving, change lanes and manage your stamina.

In between, there are shrimp to peel and tea to serve. Shrimp peeling calls for quick reactions. In the tea ceremony, you need to serve your guests Kluntje rock sugar, tea and cream in the right order, while keeping track of who is waiting for what. At first, that sounds like a relaxing break. Once several cups are empty at the same time, things look a little different.

You can play all five events in a row or choose an individual event straight away. Play solo or compete with two to four players taking turns on the same device. Your best results go into the local leaderboards. The worldwide high scores also let you see how everyone else is doing.

There is plenty to discover along the way

To create the game world, we took another, closer look at East Frisia. Buildings we pass all the time. The shape of a windmill. Small animals by the roadside. Much of it goes almost unnoticed in everyday life, then suddenly matters when you want to make it recognisable in just a few pixels.

That is how real places and landmarks found their way into our landscapes. The album lets you take another look at these places and sights at your own pace. You might recognise something from your last holiday. Or something you drove past this morning.

Who is making it

We are Elfi and Tim from m01n studios in Aurich, and we are developing Ostfriesland Games together with Ostfriesland Tourismus GmbH. Tim handles the programming, while Elfi takes care of the graphics and sound. Deciding where a little frog's eye should go can therefore take up a fair amount of working time.

We want the game to show what we like about East Frisia. The landscape, its quirks and its people. If you are from East Frisia, you will probably recognise quite a few things. You might even discover that you are better at road bowling on screen than on the road. And if you do not know East Frisia yet, playing will give you a first taste of what we get up to with tea and a long pole.

Language note: The game offers English and German text, plus an optional Low German (Plattdeutsch) setting. Some text in the Low German setting remains in German.

Funding

The joint project “KulTour-Innovationen für Ostfriesland” (KIO) by Ostfriesische Landschaft and Ostfriesland Tourismus GmbH is funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry for Economic Affairs, Transport, Building and Digitalisation, the districts of Aurich, Leer and Wittmund, and the independent city of Emden.