![]() ![]() GD: Most of the games I play that I’ve been getting into are more of the European “designer” games or “tabletop” gaming…ĮP: Right. But in terms of common gameplay around the house, I’d say that Scrabble and chess are the two most popular. Any new game out there I’ll buy at your local Target or Barnes and Noble and check out, give it a go. But in terms of party games, I’ve pretty much stuck to the classics that your average non-gamer probably mentions: Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly with nieces and nephews. I like playing chess with friends, backgammon. GD: What board games do you enjoy, before creating Loaded Questions, for instance?ĮP: Aside from test playing my own games to death, my wife and will definitely play the occasional Scrabble. Except for the New Yorker game-I didn’t draw all the cartoons! But the content for my other games, yeah, that’s the real fun part I have with my business. And I do write the content for all my games. The new black edition has more than 1300 questions and I’m probably responsible for 1200 of them. GD: Now did you write all of the questions for the first edition, and the new edition?ĮP: Pretty much. But, no, I’ve had several duds, several that have done well, and then the Loaded Questions games have been my most popular games. You’re trying to get your chicken, which is your game piece, across the road. Whoever writes down the funniest original one gets to advance. If you know the punch line you advance on the board and if you don’t you’re trying to come up with the funniest one. I did a game called The Joke Game where, if you don’t know the punch line, you make one up. A few years ago, I partnered with the New Yorker magazine and did a game based on their weekly caption contest that runs in the back of the magazine, where you see a cartoon and come up with your own caption. GD: Have you published any other board games?ĮP: I’ve done twelve games, five of which are Loaded Questions games. So that’s the start of my board games–it started with the one idea. Today the game has sold a million copies and it’s at Target, Toys R Us, Barnes & Noble, Borders, all the websites and such. The following year they brought it into all stores, and that’s kind of the early success of Loaded Questions. That year, 1997, Toys R Us decided to test it in about a hundred stores and it tested very well. I sold about 1,000 games, I got a lot of good media coverage. During the trip the game was pretty successful. You know, I’d splurge on a Motel 6 if I needed to. Very few responsibilities, so I was able to camp out and sleep cheaply. I was just out of college, I wasn’t married, no kids, like I am now. Shortly after that, I started driving around the country for 16 weeks selling the game out of the trunk of my car to mom and pop stores. Not too many weeks or months afterward I produced 5,000 copies of my first game, Loaded Questions. I thought the idea was great, I quit my job, invited friends over for pizza and beer. At the age of 23 I had an idea for a board game while I was working as a copywriter at an ad agency in Miami. But my biggest note is that next time? I’m playing while drinking.Eric Poses: I’m 35, I live in Miami, and I’ve been in the world of board games for 13 years now. The game is designed to work for both couples and groups, and I think it would be more fun to play with people who didn’t know each other as well rather than as a couple. (Helpfully, they're marked with a category symbol-I'll just sort them out next time.) As much as convention says that you should never run out of things to talk to your partner about, even the most in-love of us occasionally feel like all conversations are some version of “Is the dishwasher clean or dirty?” or “Did you text the landlord about the sink again? It’s still clogged.” While I certainly think there are couples who don’t normally have conversations about things like “If I could change one thing about how I were raised it would be…,” personally I thought the sex questions were the most interesting and helpful, since it’s often hard to talk honestly about sex without a prompt, and I would frankly play a game that was just with them. That said, I like games for couples I think they often work well for people who aren’t practiced at sharing vulnerable or intimate things.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |