The pitch
You are a cosmetic chemist. Coloured powders arrive at your bench. You mix them into eyeshadow shades and press them into a palette. Your goal: press as many pans as you can, in the most valuable shades you can, over five rounds.
Two things make this hard. You rarely get exactly the chips you want. And a Shade card shows you a colour but never tells you what is in it — that is printed on the back, and you have to work it out before you look.
Every ingredient is real and every reaction is real. When you finish, turn over an actual eyeshadow palette and read the label. You will recognise most of it.
Ingredients
The six chips
Red
Red iron oxide
Pigment
Yellow
Yellow iron oxide
Pigment
Blue
Ultramarine
Pigment
White
Titanium dioxide
Pigment, lightens
Shimmer
Mica
Pigment, adds shimmer
Binder
Zinc stearate
Holds the powder together
The first five are pigments — they make the colour. The sixth is binder — it is the glue. That difference matters on every single turn.
What's in the box
- 4 palette boards (four pans each; Atom Key, absorption chart and Kiln printed on them)
- 80 paper chips
- 12 water tokens
- 27 Shade cards (colour on the front, recipe on the back)
- 4 Fault cards (symptom on the front, cause on the back)
- 1 Market sheet (supply crates and Spill Tray)
- 1 First Chemist token
Everything prints on ordinary paper.
Part of Modulo Inc.
PRESSED is one of the Modulo Inc. science board games, designed to be given free to schools and children's centres.