Wilmot's Warehouse

| 1 Aug 2021 min read

If you are a Marie Kondo fan, there’s a game just for you. It’s called Wilmot’s Warehouse. I picked it up on Switch, and I couldn’t put it down other than when I had to feed my son.

Imagine that you are an Amazon staff working in their warehouse. You have two jobs: receiving items from a delivery truck and then handing those items to the customers. The catch is that the volume of items delivered is several magnitudes higher than what the customers want. Also, once the customer appears, you’ll need to get the items fast, which means you need to organise the items well.

The items are things you can commonly find in Amazon: books, hats, ski gear. Each object occupies a square, and they have background and foreground colours. I noticed that the background colours are easy to distinguish.

The first system I thought of to manage the items is using the colour wheel. The customer counter is at the 12 o’clock position, and the delivery area is at 6 o’clock. So starting clockwise from the 1 o’clock position, I place the items with red backgrounds, then at 3 o’clock, I line up the orange items. Next, I put yellow, green, blue, purple items in that order. Finally, at 11 o’clock position, I place the brown objects. Although brown as a colour is usually closer to red, the brown in this game has a hue value closer to purple.

When I googled how others played the game, they came up with more traditional classifications like books, shoes, geometric shapes. Funny how my system is so different, but I think this is where the game shines. It’s easy for everyone to understand but hard to master.

In some ways, I like the game because I get enjoyment from tidying my living spaces. Wilmot’s warehouse is what I do daily. Groceries get delivered, then I put each item where I can find them easily. When I can’t find things, I rethink where are the better locations to put them.

After completing the game, I couldn’t stop myself from decluttering the wardrobe and the tools' section of my house. Indeed, just like what Marie Kondo said, organising things sparks joy.