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Play on Facebook!
Try out our free online game on Facebook!
Play with all your friends and compete to see who knows them best!
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.
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Gift Giving Game Season Is Upon Us - Can you fill my cloud?
I’ve been exploring a bunch of Web 2.0 tools to see which ones can help us promote GiftTRAP. It’s a simple equation (expressed in pseudo code)
for Web2.0_App.each do
if Time.to_register > Outcome.value then :Register :else :Next_Site end
end
I found one yesterday called Tag Cloud.
You get to register your own unique tag and they give you a link and you get points for traffic.
Well I registered the term “Gift Giving Game” - as the end of the day that’s exactly what GiftTRAP is, perhaps “Gift Game” is an even shorter term, but perhaps totally meaningless . Our marketing challenge is people have no idea what that means, so we use something a little more fun, except when searching in the Holiday season its quite a hot term.
So I registered and created my free “Tag” and here’s it is.
Click it and I get points. I don’t know what I get when I get points. Hopefully I’ll find out.
Whilst “Gift Giving Game” is the simplest way of capturing the game, it also tends to make people think of the following terms
- Secret Santa
- White Elephant Gift Exchange
- Dirty Santa
- Thieving Secret Santa
- Yankee Swap
- An excuse for “regifting” old junk to unsuspecting colleagues
- A chance to ding your boss or someone who’s just pissed you off. Make sure you give them something gross
- An excuse to flirt with someone at work
I must admit I’d never hard of Yankee Swap. Is that an americanized politically correct all-inclusive term for the same thing? Is that like saying “Holidays” instead of “Christmas”. I guess so.
We hope these terms have a a fun association which we hope helps generate a positive reaction to our game (both the Online Web 2.0 Game and our classic award winning board game)
Well let’s see just how many points I get. I’m not holding my breath, but it’s good to try these different Web 2.0 tools.
It seems like a Web 2.0 Game based on traffic generating. Well the icons are cool, so that got me at the first click
. The way I figure it is if I don’t try someone else’s app, how can I expect someone to try mine Actually posting this was fun. I think I’ll blog each different app I try. A kind of how did Web 2.0 change my world theme. Lets see how I go.
I’ve only got another 6,000 apps to try. If you want to suggest one to me I’ll give it a whirl.
Click click away…
GAMES Magazine Best Party Game of the year 2007/2008
We heard a rumor last night (Oct 8th’07) GiftTRAP was tipped to win GAMES Magazine Best Party Game of the year 2007/2008.
Prior winners include Apples to Apples, Snorta, Cranium Hoopla and Wits & Wagers. If you need a new cool game this holiday you know where to look!
It’s great to be a member of this exclusive club.
"The best partygame since Cranium. Simply a fantastic concept."
GiftTRAP is on sale in Norway in the for Christmas and the first reviews are in.
The review is by Brett Spill Guiden and it’s in Norwegian. We hope to post some more extracts soon.
That’s such an awesome quote, it’s great to be compared to such a successful game.
What’s interesting is that the game is in English (with Norwegian rules) . Lots or Norwegians speak perfect English so its not that strange. Even more amazing was the reactions to GiftTRAP in France when we launched a year ago. At the time GiftTRAP was available in English only. Given how the French generally don’t tolerate “English Only” product this is impressive. A year later we have now produced a English/French version which will be in the stores shortly.
We look forward to hearing more reviews from Norway.
Thanks!
Congratulations to Mattel on acquiring Apples to Apples
It’s great to watch an industry over time and it was of no surprise that Apples to Apples was acquired.
For those who don’t know Apples to Apples is the outrageous comparisons, award-winning card and party game that provides instant fun for four to ten players!
There’s almost a magic barrier of 1-2-3 million games or more at which point any board game will be acquired by a major company like Hasbro or Mattel.
Trying to find accurate/reliable sales volumes for board games isn’t easy, many are just myths, but here’s my list of games in the exclusive million copy club.
- Monopoly - 500m
- Uno 150m
- Scrabble - 100m
- Tivial Pursuit - 90m
- Yahtzee - 50m
- Operation - 50m
- Pictionary -25m
- Cleudo - 25m
- Twister - 15m
- Scruples - 7m
- Settlers of Catan - 6m
- Albalone - 4m
- Cranium - 4m
- Tribond - 3m
- Scene IT - 3m
- Apples to Apples -3m
- Mindtrap - 1m
- Blurt - 1m
- Urban Legends - 1m
I couldn’t find any figures for these games but I’m sure they are all in this category too
- Taboo
- Scattegories
- Balderdash
- Scattegories
- Outburst
- Zobmondo
The sources for this vary far and wide and it was the most exhaustive list I could assemble at the time as an outsider to the industry. What’s interesting is nearly all these games were invented by independent inventors. There’s always space for that in this industry. Feel free to email me any corrections
Who’s on the list to become the independent game stores replacement for Apples to Apples and on route to the million copy club? Here’s a few candidates for great games for the holidays 2007
- Wits & Wager
- Sentence Says
- GiftTRAP
- Table Topics
- Loaded Questions
- Imaginiff
- Times UP
- Smarty Party
Ruby on Rails Rocks
GiftTRAP Live is all down to Ruby on Rails.
When I decided I wanted to develop the online version of GiftTRAP we had some big decisions to make. We needed to pick a platform. I’d been a big fan or Expression Engine (and I still am - it’s used for the rest of the GiftTRAP site), but when it came to controlling workflow and sending emails it seemed very hard to get Expression Engine to do just what we wanted. We needed more of a web-based development platform.
Well after some exploration and some fact checking it seemed Ruby on Rails would be a great choice.
We tested it out and as per the marketing we had a simple version running in 3 days. Oh if life were so simple. It took us a good few months more to really finish the system and to go through the different iterations of refining what it was we wanted tweaking workflows accordingly.
Well I have to say I’m very impressed. The level of information, examples, Gems, Plugins etc is just fantastic.
I don’t profess to be the greatest coder in the world, but it’s been a fun process to learn ruby from scratch and to take a site from idea to reality.
This is the first website I’ve built from scratch, prior to building GiftTRAP Live I has skills in Visual Basic.
I’ve simply bought a handful of Ruby and Rails books and used the web.
I’ve had some initial guidance from the odd friend along the way.
Well now we get to see how it works, how it scales etc etc
There is still loads more to do, more features, cooler graphics, more gift ideas, but at least we got there.
I’d like to thank my good friend Bernie Dekoven first came up with the twist of an idea we needed to make this a reality.
We hope you like it.
Check it out. It’s free and very simple to get going - you hardly notice that you are registering.
I’ll write another post to name the components we’ve used
I found it incredibly helpful to have found other sites detailing the components they used.
What’s coming? Well were thinking about a Facebook app, we also have some Instant Messaging integration to test out and we want to let people create their own gifts.
Got any bright ideas. Let is know.
Meanwhile have fun playing GifTTRAP online or in the flesh.
Gone Boarding : Blogzone