sand:box

When you’re on a five hour flight, sometimes you need something to pass the time. While, for me, passing the time normally involves writing, drawing and listening to music, sometimes you just want to do something else to pass the time. Something a bit silly.

There are hundreds of sandbox games on the Play Store, and I’ve played a few of them. I was surprised a while back that Solar Smash was on Play Store as a free to play game with adverts. Minecraft could also be considered a sandbox game, and originally it had a demo on the Play Store, but now you have to buy the mobile version, and it was never particularly good. Sure, it works, but the controls are wonky and lack any real precision. Another really good sandbox game is Worldbox, which is what my brother played on our five hour flight. As for me though, I played something a lot more simple. I played sand:box, which is available on the Play Store and has a minuscule download size.

Sand:box is a very simple, pixel-based sandbox game. You get given a ton of different materials that all interact with each other, a black screen and some options you can fiddle with. That’s pretty much it. But there’s a deceptively large amount of things you can do with what you’re given.

The newest features seem to be electrical-orientated. It comes with wires, batteries, LEDs and some sort of display which I haven’t quite figured out yet. There’s also various logic gates, which are pretty cool. You know, your standard, AND, OR, XOR gates and things like that. I’ve managed to make a few contraptions, like a heating wire I can turn on and off to melt various objects, but there’s a lot to be explored.

Most of the time though, I find myself blowing things up or setting things on fire. And blimey, there are a lot of things to blow up. Petrol, nitroglycerin, C4, gunpowder and more. And you can have different fuses and things like that. For a pixel aesthetic, the explosions are pretty damn cool. My favourite thing to do though is play around with uranium. If you keep uranium cool, then it doesn’t do anything. But as it heats up, it slowly melts and degrades, until it finally explodes and annihilates pretty much everything.

The nature options though are also pretty neat. If you have water and soil, you can plant some, uh, plants, and watch them grow. The vines seem to grow endlessly, as does the moss and algae, but sadly the bamboo and flowers stop after a while. Termites though are a serious risk and they will eat anything you place very quickly. You can also play the Game of Life inside sand:box, which is pretty neat.

The best thing though is that sand:box has no ads. You can buy a premium version, which does unlock some extra toys to play with, but the majority of items are free to use right off the bat. The fact that sand:box has no ads is pretty fucking neat and is often a rarity in the free to play mobile game world. Sand:box also doesn’t collect any data at all. You just play the game and have fun, no need to worry about data being sent off to third parties or anything like that.

I personally think you should give sand:box a go. It’s not mind-blowing but it respects you and your time. And it’s always fun blowing things up.