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Games Magazine Best Party Game of the year 2007/2008

GiftTRAP wins GAMES Magazine’s “Best Party Game of the year 2007/2008”

What's the idea?

Click here to find out how we’ve turned gift giving into a hilarious social experience

Discover the fun!

Click to unwrap the fun.

Puts your gifts to the test!

GiftTRAP is the hilarious new game that’s taking the gaming world by storm and putting the social back into board games.

The goal is to really get to know your friends and family.

You win by knowing your friends and choosing the right gifts, but most of all it’s just fun to play and gets you talking about things that matter.

• 3-8 Players, 5+
• Playtime 45-75 mins
• Learn in 10 mins

• 1 full size game board
• 640 Gift Ideas
• Rules
• 8 Organza Gift Bags containing; scoring markers, gift & choice tokens plus advanced strategy cards

Love to play Trivial Pursuit, Cranium or Apples to Apples - You will love this family party game.

GiftTRAP is all the fun of Secret Santa without needing to shop or wrap.

Sign-up; Offers & updates!

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What kind of Gift Giver are you?

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I must confess to feeling sorry for Hasbro on occasions for their stupidity. Now if someone told me Scrabulous (Wordscraper) was a “plant” funded for Hasbro I’d be impressed - all generated by an idea from some off the wall “social media” agency - then I’d laugh out loud..

Not only have they benefited from increased sales of Scrabble - it’s practically been relaunched, they also sell a million plus copies per year so their brand isn’t doing too bad and instead of applauding the innovation they stamp all over it.

I’m commenting as an indie board game publisher of the award winning party game GiftTRAP, which is built on the back of Creative Commons licenses, so I’m a huge supporter of this “mix it up” school. The CC guys have have really supportive of our game and we couldn’t have made our game a success without it. Yet success is all about attention and you’d think Hasbro would get that.

To me it’s a crime to “kill” the attention Scrabulous has given them. Was Hasbro really thinking people wanted to switch to a legal version of their game. I laughed when I read a defensive quote from Hasbro saying they “will continue to innovate on Scrabble” - (oh I forgot about the Onyx version)

I’ve published a Facebook app of my game and so I know how hard it is. Launching a virtual gift-exchange game a year after Free Gifts and Facebook Gifts have delivered 150 million virtual gifts is huge. Social media sites like Flickr, LinkedIn, Boardgamegeek and Facebook have been our saviour in getting our game to market. To get attention it’s all about timing and story.

People don’t just use the apps because they are there. The edgyness and illegality of the Scrabulous game was half the attraction. Facebook has dampened the impact of apps and users have lost their curiosity. I’m not surprised with 30k apps on offer.

I’d trade in our “Best Party Game” award for a share of their attention but it doesnt happen that way.

What I dislike most about the big game companies is they don’t really have to try. It’s not about the games anymore (we don’t need more new copies of the same old stuff), it’s about the control of the channels to market. Consumers just keep buying monopoly spinoffs, Onyx scrabble sets and the list goes on. How many times can people buy the same games. http://boardgamegeek.com is a great place to look for truly great games and read what real people think.

Just please don’t buy any licensed/branded games - “Some sad Shrek Game” or “Desperate Housewives Trivia.”.  Just like buying a good book make sure if you buy a game that is has awards and great reviews form trusted sources. These “cookie cutter” games have no innovation and you’ll pretty much play them once and forget them if you are lucky.

The problem or the miracle of something like Scrabble/Monopoly etc is that it’s become a self repeating part of culture. It’s almost genetic.

So go on break the mold and go buy an indie game. Even better buy one in the summer and really buck the trend!

Firstly I’ve got to say I like the name Wordscraper”

Speaking as an indie board game inventor/publisher I like it. I know from experience that naming your game is far from easy.

And obviously they needed to avoid any resemblance to “Scrabble”

And the speed of development was fast

Well actually not quite so fast.

According to an update that’s visible on Facebook it seems it was fully functional by April 6, 2008

So now I give even more Kudos to the whole affair and to the Agarwalla brothers for having the skill to time their moves.

It’s becoming a well-managed media show and some great strategic execution. I’m wondering what else do they have up their sleeve!

First the wave of coverage all about the lawsuit

Next the wave all about the shutdown

And now a third wave all about the rebirth of Scrabulous as Wordscraper

So all along we thought that perhaps Hasbro has timed their lawsuit to coincide with release of EA’s buggy hacker friendly version of Scrabble

So now we have two not so nimble not so popular not so scalable Scrabble apps from Hasbro and Mattel

And we get a cool new app from Scrabulous that has probably been ready all this time.

Full kudos to them for playing the game. Hasbro and Mattel must be wondering what next.

Maximizing and controlling the release of information and planning their responses is a very smart thing to do.

And in starting with a new app from scratch they achieve two things;

1/ They prove the Hasbro et all that it’s not about being called something like Scrabble
2/ They show they the working effectively with social media is all about speed and timing

Im second guessing lots of stuff here, but the update is there for all to see.

So the big question is how fast will people jump to use Wordscaper?

Well get a good clue tomorrow, but the information broke a bit late to have much impact on tomorrow user numbers.

How much will it grow from around 200 daily active users.

How fast can they get past Hasbro’s Scrabble game that I think had reached 50k users.

Well have to wait and see.

Will Scrabulous users now be encouraged to migrate?

It’s funny as I thought two things the other day about what Scrabulous should do.

a/ Change the name
b/ Make the board random and saveable

Bingo!

I got both features with 48 hours of closedown.

It’s a bit like Scrabble goes opensource.

Lets see what turns out to be the most popular board/scoring layout now?

What can Hasbro & Mattel do?

Watch, listen, learn.

Here’s the link to Wordscraper

I’m so glad the “Davids” had a counter move for the “Golliaths”.

This is such fun to watch as a board game pubhlisher and a Facebook app developer.

And will Wordscraper be on sale in board game stores.

Who knows.

Why not

The would turn a web revolt into a consumer boom

There’s currently only 197 daily active users.

Will it explode?

Creativity can be a curse! Being an inventor isn’t just fun.

There are many ups and downs on the road to success. Many ideas don’t make it off the runway. Some fail when they reach the market.

Just getting your idea to market is an amazing achievement but that “happiness” derived from this activity can soon dwindle.

So here’s an idea I picked up along the way. I can’t remember who told me about this technique (so apologies if it was you). The idea stuck and that’s what matters

So lets take my example with GiftTRAP.

So far we’ve made 44,000 games. That’s quite a feat, Most indie board games don’t get past 2-3k. Hasbro/Mattel by way of contrast doesn’t sell a game that does less than 400k units/annum. There’s a lot of full garages resulting in homes of aspiring inventors.

So the key question is how much pleasure have you brought to the world through using your invention.

Now how many people get involved with using your product? Now Toothbrushes and Toilet Brushes get used and shared much less than Games, for example

With a game for 3-8 players that gets played say 5 times a year for 3 years by an average of 6 friends for an average of an hour, you can get to a nice number.

In this case its 5x3x6x1 = 90 (I call this the Hours of Pleasure)

Now multiply your units sold x hours of pleasure.

In may example that’s 396,000 hours.

It’s a nice simple way for an inventor to think about their achievement.

That’s a lot of great conversations and a lot of laughter.

It made me happy to think of things in this way and I thought I’d share the thought.

It’s great so our game including on such a prominent “Dad” / “Parenting” blog such as MrDad. Armin seems to have done a great job setting himself up as a respected voice in this domain.

If you blog on being a “Mom” or a “Dad” and you play games with your kids or friends we’d love to hear from you.

We’re always looking for more opinions and feedback on our game.

We connected with Armin via the HARO (Help a Reporter Out Service).

When I spoke to him he said he’d been inundated with lots of games to review. I’m not surprised there’s a lot of games out there,

It’s great that we made it through the selection process.

You can pick up GiftTRAP at Barnes and Noble stores or online

It’s also available in lots of independent board games stores in the USA and around the world.

Enjoy

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