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Genuinely, brace yourselves! It is the single best game I have ever played ever. It’s so good. If it doesn’t become the biggest game in the world, there will have been an injustice. I could play it every day and never get bored of it.
With Ansagrams, it popped into my head fully formed. I just had the idea of ‘Anagrams are fun. You could solve those by taking the first letter of every answer.’ That’s as far as the thought went! I’ve got a few game ideas that will be coming in the next couple of years that are in that family space that will lend themselves to licensing in a really big way, in a similar way that Dobble does. You want a partnership whereby they want to partner with you because the game is good, and you want to partner with them because their brand is going to introduce more people to that game. We did a Dragons’ Den-style Zoom pitch to the Asmodee guys in the States and we were offered a global distribution deal that covers the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. They wanted the games I’ve mentioned, plus our newest one, Noggin. We can’t think of a better partner for global distribution than Asmodee.Television and Sony Award-nominated radio presenter Matt Edmondson established himself as a board game inventor when he created the party game Obama Llama. Last year, he followed it up with the sold-out-success Ansagrams, which he published independently. Play continues with a different quiz master so that everyone has a roughly equal chance to play. The end-goal is to use the cards you win to spell out a 3-letter word with your winning cards. Matt, great to catch up. Before we dive into all things Format Games, how did you get into game design? Were you into games from a young age? Matt Edmondson first entered the game space as the inventor of Big Potato’s Obama Llama, and last year he self-published Ansagrams. Let’s look at Format Games’ debut line-up. Ansagrams and So Wrong, It’s Right are both fun twists on trivia games. Did you consciously set out to bring something new to the trivia space?
When I was in my twenties, I played more games. I was sent Bananagrams – which I loved – and I would often play card games with my housemates, but I’d never thought about creating my own game.
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It has to be a two-word answer to be a spoonerism, so I thought what if the words swapped around. So then I had two things! Then I thought you could just give the correct answer normally – so now I had three elements. We’ve likened the experience to a couple of guys taking up busking on Monday, then being signed by a major label for a five-record deal by Friday,” said Laurence Emmett, Co-Founder of Format Games. Anagrams are words or phrases you spell by reorganizing the letters of a different word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once. For instance, the Matt, thanks for taking time out for this – it’s been a lot of fun. To bring things full circle – you mentioned at the start about having a bad time with a Home Alone 2 board game. Are licensed games something you want to explore with Format Games?
We have a game coming out next year called Noggin – which I genuinely think is the best game I’ve ever played, not just invented! – and it has that same kind of thing going on.Now Matt and his brother-in-law Laurence Emmett have founded Format Games and are launching two new games this year in the form of colour-mixing card game Egg Slam and trivia title, So Wrong It’s Right. You licensed Obama Llama to Big Potato. Did that process act as a bit of a crash course into the games industry? Great stuff. Now you said there that self-publishing sounded hard, but fast-forward to today and you’ve launched your own games company in Format Games. What changed your mind? Format Games’ credibility as an indie games label has been given the seal of approval by Asmodee, which first signed it up for UK distribution in February 2021. Seeing the potential of Matt’s designs, and recognising the worldwide appeal of the game formats, August saw Asmodee follow this up with an exclusive global distribution deal covering the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. Television and Sony Award-nominated radio presenter Matt Edmondson has launched a new board game company called Format Games.
I bashed out the questions in a couple of days, but if a graphic designer watched me try and design it, they would’ve found it hilarious. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’ve always been keen to learn, so using YouTube and TikTok I figured out how to make it. Also, through people knowing my personality because of the radio or having played my previous games, they trust that I like board games and I know what I’m doing. In that respect it’s easier.
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If this game has caught your attention, you’ve probably been drawn in by the appeal of a fun word game with friends. That’s understandable, word games have definitely become more popular lately. We've recently seen the rise of web-based apps like Wordle and Facebook’s Words with Friends. If you haven't played them, you've probably heard of them! Not really if I’m honest! We did play a lot of board games and card games because we went on a family camping holiday every year, so we would often take games there. Every Christmas we’d get a new board game, often one that was tied into a movie or TV show. My sister got a Garfield board game and it was quite disappointing, and I got a Home Alone 2 board game, which I was very excited about because it needed batteries… But the gameplay was extremely complicated! I would never sit down and say “I’m going to do a trivia game, what’s the twist?” The twist always comes first. Its outer box boasts that Ansagrams takes 30 minutes to play and 2 minutes to learn. Whilst this may be true for some, I’d recommend learning by doing and having the first round be a trial round.
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