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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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Ok, it’s a bit of a cliche, but for my own sanity I thought I’d write down my resolutions.

Here they are;

• To blog regularly
• To play more games
• To snowboard more
• To take more time to read
• To track my website metrics with less obesssion :(

Let’s see how it goes

Last night (Thursday 5th October ‘06) I sent an email with this title. Here’s what it said;

I’ve spent the last two years developing a great new party board game called GiftTRAP (http://www.GiftTRAP.com).  We have been getting great reviews and it is really taking off.

Nick



I sent this to 3,300 of my LinkedIn connections. I’ve been a huge LinkedIn fan since I read Keith Ferrazzi’s best seller Never Eat Alone. Keith sold me me on the idea of connecting ahead.

I received some great responses and THREE amazing posts that I wasn’t expecting.

One from an old friend and mentor, Dave Kellogg , CEO of MarkLogic, and former CMO of Business Objects, which was where I first met Dave. I learnt a whole new way to approach innovation from Dave, which is probably solely responsible for me staying so long at Business Objects. Double thanks to Dave, a dab hand at idea aggregation and standing on the shoulders of giants.

Here’s Dave’s post on GiftTRAP and it’s emerging role in the Web 2.0 landscape; http://marklogic.blogspot.com/

My second from my new friend, Omar Ismail, at Web 2.0 company Product Wiki, I love their site, it’s such a great concept and set for greatness. He posted my email on the GiftTRAP entry on Product Wiki

My third unexpected post came from Ricardo McRae who posted an entry on Hook Me Up Thanks Ricardo. Ricardo & I simply connected on LinkedIn a few months ago. The power of loose connections never cease to amaze me! You’ve got to love Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point.

In addition I got a number of rave responses to the concept behind GiftTRAP and to the launch event. Some even suggested I get featured on Boing Boing If only such idea were that easy! While we’re in the wishing well could someone book me a slot on Oprah’s couch - I promise not to jump up and down!

Why am I not on Oprah or Boing Boing because I didn’t think to connect ahead into the blogging and media domains! Better late than never! My problem is my good ideas always seem to come along on a just-in-time basis!

Hiding in the cupboard, returning to the store, selling on eBay, re-gifting, garage sales and charity shops; there are many ways to dispose of unwanted gifts.

Here’s some interesting statistics on gift giving, interesting given the theme of the game;

- 40% of gifts are a disappointment to the recipient
- Therefore 40% of the gifts we give are unwanted
- The average person gives 29 presents per year
- The average gift costs US$52
- The annual gift spend per person is US$1,500
- Lifetime cost of gift giving : US$87,000 per person
- Lifetime cost of bad gifting : US$35,000 per person

What else could you buy with an extra $35,000? Look here for some ideas!
Is this connected to the fact that we are all so short of time? Do we have the time to really pick the perfect gift? How well do we really know our friends? How well do they know us?
Is it not time we stood up and confessed to the giver? Etiquette seems to declare we do not tell the giver - meaning we get the same lousy gift next time around!

If you can’t handle dropping hints to Aunt Flo or Uncle Joe to improve their poor gifting, try giving them GiftTRAP next holiday and save your family a heap of cash! Who knows it may improve the gifts you give too! It could be the best investment you make this year.

Research :

UK homewares giant, Habitat surveyed 1,000 people on their gift giving habitats. The research was was picked up by a number of local newspapers and magazines quoting Victoria Eden, Habitat UK PR Manager (we converted all £ values from the UK study into US$)

Sources

Which Magazine : Britons drowning in clutter mountain

Daily Mail : How was waste £19,000 on gifts

Britons are drowning under a mountain of unwanted gifts that they’re too embarrassed to return, a new survey reveals today.

Homewares giant Habitat says the average person buys 29 presents each year and 40 per cent of these will be a disappointment to the recipient.

The survey of 1,000 people also found that 57 per cent of British households have been too embarrassed to return any unloved presents, while an enterprising 20 per cent have passed an unwanted gift on as a present to someone else.

Habitat also says that two thirds of the public haven’t cleared out their clutter for more than six months.
Gift service

Victoria Eden of Habitat said: People need to be smarter about their giving. With so many homes kitted out with the latest mod cons it is time to give people something they actually want and can chose themselves.

ёWe found that half of the respondents would rather have vouchers or money than gifts that have been purchased sporadically.

Habitat revealed the results of the survey at the launch of a new gift service. It offers an account to which friends and family pledge money and the cash can then be used to buy what you want. You can register online, over the phone on 020 7614 5397 or in any Habitat store.

Source : Which Magazine :  http://www.which.co.uk/reports_and_campaigns/house_and_home/Reports/family/British_clutter_mountain_news_article_557_92827.jsp

How we waste £19,000 on Gifts

From socks to novelty jumpers the average Briton speond £18,800 buying unwanted presents in a lifetime according to a survey.

And the research reveals that 57% of recipients are too embarassed to return them.

More than a fifth sell the unwanted gifts on an Internet auction site and 23% give them to charity.

A shameless 20% re-wrap them to give to someone else.

The survey, by Habitat, found that Britons buy an average of 29 presents every year, at a total cost of £825; meaning they spend £47,000 over a lifetime.

More than a quarter of people surveyed said they had received more than one of the same gift before.

Victoria Eden, from Habitat, said: ‘People need to me smarter about their giving. With so many homes kitted out with the latest mod cons it is time to actually give people something they actually want and can choose themselves. We found that half of the respondents would rather have vouchers’/

The Habitat research also discovered that we are a nation of hoarders

- two thirds of us have not cleared out our clutter from our houses for more than six months
- one in ten has not had a clearout in more than five years

Sound : Daily Mail Monday 21st of August 2006

I loved the book “Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz, because for me it really captured a sense of the world in which we live.

Remember how long it used to take to book a holiday before the web? And now how long do we take to research the creation of that perfect holiday? Life used to be simpler, but if holidays are important to you it’s s good thing, but not all choices are good for everyone.

The premise of the book as that while every extra choice is good, at some point the total number of choices available becomes too great. We get stuck in analysis paralysis and actually don’t make any decisions or suffer buyers remorse from decisions we have made.  We loose many hours to making choices for every element of our designer lives.

Choice while being empowering actually disables. Too much choice leads to unhappiness. The book recommends some simple steps to regain some of the time we have lost to choosing.

Simple steps to a simpler life…

- Decide on a few things that really matter to you and elongate and enjoy decisions for these items. This may be purchasing an iPod, booking your holiday, choosing a bottle of wine. This he calls “maximizing”.

- Other decision he recommends you “satisfice”. If you need a pair of jeans, but don’t care, buy the same pair as your last pair. If you aren’t a car expert and don’t fancy spending the next 6 weekends at car dealerships evaluating options, simply defer to a friend or an expert. Keep your options to as few as possible and make a quick decision.

In a world where everything is a choice and we personally become our own uber brand composed of all our micro decisions I thought this idea was very appealing. I’ve managed to implement these approach and recovered a whole bunch of time from the black whole of analysis paralysis.

Extreme choice (aka abundance) is cited in Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind as one of the three drivers to why right brain thinking is set to surface as a dominant influence in commerce.

I find it ironic that with creativity set to drive commerce that consumers frequently revert to familiar names and brands even when the brand is stretched from one category to another. These brands that are liencesed to products simply becasue they sell. Breaking through with creativity takes extreme measures if you want a big hit. If you read The Long Tail you discover that perhaps there won’t be so many big hits any more, simply becasue its no longer feasible to reach the same size of audiences in the past. Today’s markets are much more fragmented.

Toys and games feature many licensed products. Product teams are faced with a dilemma; should we create something new and risk failure or shall license a trusted brand. It often the case that you’ll find the product in the clearance isle becasuse they products often aren’t that great and able to stand up on their own without the brand name. Brands work in stores to sell products, but the brand can’t turn a bad product into a good one.

As an example

CSI
Desperate Housewives
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
Survivor

Breaking through the noise takes extreme effort and can be potentially expensive. In books, for example, it’s now common to massively seed bookstores with free copies for the staff to make an impression. 15,000 copies of Brokeback Mountain were distributed free to bookstore staff in an effort to break through the noise.

With so many books to choose picking a book as a gift is a pretty tough challenge. Picking a book for yourself is challenging enough.

A game based on Shrek or a Desperate Housewives will garner automatic sales. Executives expect these brands to needed to assist any new product. Large companies forget their past and fail to innovate internally.

I thought it was about time I started blogging on a number of themes relating to giving, gifts, board games, snow boarding, wake boarding, mother boarding (software,web 2.0, technology), white boarding (building a brand in 2006 and beyond)

I wanted to blog the whole experience of being a new board game company in this crazy world in which we live.

So here it goes....

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