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Play on Facebook/ Twitter!
Try out our free online game on Twitter!
Play with all your friends and compete to see who knows them best!
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Follow the inventor of GiftTRAP and his exploits in gaming and social media
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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"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.
Try GiftTRAP Live
GiftTRAP Live is the first site to track just how well you know each of your friends and family! Who knows you best? Who do you know best?
It’s a social collaborative game based on exchanging gifts, but its also competitive! You rank by knowing your friends best and by them knowing you!
We’ve taken GiftTRAP, the award winning board game & merged in elements from eCards, Wish-lists and social gaming, all in a Web 2.0 style. Its all about fun & learning what makes you & your friends tick!
GiftTRAP Update
Ok, so here’s the news. Good and not so good.
We’re running behind schedule on the remix contest, in fact we got diverted on a couple of other projects, that and the game business has dealt us a few challenges along the way. Game publishing is one big emotional roller coaster!
Anyhow, we won’t be making it to Essen for 2007, but we are back on the hunt for new gift ideas for the GiftTRAP Minis expansion packs. We will be featuring the winning games with the product. So apologies for not communicating the earlier. We aren’t quite sure of the launch plan at this point, but we should have a better idea by the end of September and we’ll reconfirm the main prize at that point too.
We have some great submissions for the contest, but we can’t make them available until we have a firm plan for the Minis.
On the good news front, we are now officially out of stock - all 10,000 copies of GiftTRAP have gone! So now you can only buy it from the remaining stock at BrownBox, ACD (and game stores they supply) and from online stores such as Funagain.com that have stock.
We will be announcing two new versions of GiftTRAP shortly (all that we’ll say for now is they are both bi-lingual and family focussed) and they contain lots of new fun gift ideas and a good selection of our favorites from the first edition.)
Also we have also been working on an online version of the GiftTRAP that you can play via email with as many friends as you like, but getting these two versions ready has delayed this a little. If you want to an early tester of the game, just send us an email and we’ll send you an invite to join in the fun and you can then invite your friends. While were testing its in invite only beta mode. More soon.
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