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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.

Syndicate

What kind of Gift Giver are you?

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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.

Speaking an indie board game publisher of an award winning game called GiftTRAP I find this baffling.

I’d be happy if someone was creating half a million conversations about my brand every day and I’m sure many other “indie” game companies would agree.

I’ve created my own Facebook app to promote my game about exchanging virtual gifts a bit like Secret Santa, so I have total respect for the Scrabulous guys.

Creating a loyal active following like Scrabulous is an impressive achievement, and something I doubt that Hasbro/Mattel will recreate, especially when their efforts divide the globe. This is so “old school” and so “lawyer-driven”.

I can understand that Hasbro was forced into this simply by the argument that they had to be seen to enforce their IP or they were creating nightmares down the road, but acquisition or some kind of deal for an undisclosed sum could have kept everyone happy.

Scrabulous was “edgy” because of it’s obvious illegality and in support of the small guys. The two brothers from India vs Hasbro and Mattel makes such a great “Davids and Golliaths” story it’s easy to see why the app and the story has spread.

Having Habsbro and Mattel in on the game can’t be a simply deal to strike for anyone.

It’s got to be hard when sites like Adonomics.com as putting huge values on the Scrabulous app.

I just can’t help wonder what a PR company would have charged to create this much noise!

As a board game publisher, I know lots of independent board game publishers who, like me, would jump at the chance of getting 500k users per day playing and talking about your game even if you didn’t own the site that’s collecting $25k/month in ad revenue.

Hasbro and Mattel have both benefited from sales increases due to the born again popularity of their cash-cow game. They sell over a million copies a year when really nobody really needs another copy.

Scrabble is a board game that’s not turn based. Scrabulous is an online game. There are as many differences as there are similarities. Scrabulous defined the bar for an online word game. I think they may regret having copied the board so precisely.

Scrabulous have made the game work online and generated a dedicated crowd and this is no small task,

Now, as a follower, Hasbro with all the fuss has only managed 10k users per day, which isnt too impressive.

Isn’t Scrabulous just a better Mouse Trap they didnt copy an online version, as Scrabble didnt have one. There are other copies too and I bet they arenҒt being sued, simply because they havent created the attention or the dedicated crowd.

There are many other “copycat” game apps on Facebook and they aren’t getting sued.

I have total respect for the Scrabulous guys. We created a Facebook app in the vein of Free Gifts to help promote our game but getting your social app moving is no mean feat.  Translating a board game to an online game is far from obvious.

The Free Gifts apps get 100k daily active users on Facebook, which is pretty cool. Our game precedes Free Gifts, but you cant fight the viral nature and youve got to be first on the right platform.

Check out our app here; http://apps.new.facebook.com/gifttrap/

Unlike the Free Gifts app your friend gets to choose their own gift, the question is will you match. We have turned virtual gifts into a game.

The GiftTRAP board game is on sale in Barnes and Noble right now which is pretty cool (no doubt next to Scrabble). I’m just a few million copies behind them but gaining fast, but then we do have some pretty cool awards to our name.

I hope Facebook doesn’t drop Scrabulous. My sense is they will, but it’s hard to call.

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