55 Features Of Best Selling Board Games – No. 1 Reinvention

This is the first in a series of articles looking at various key themes and features of best-selling board games. This is a serialisation of our book ’55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games’.

Reinvention can sell more units than mere Invention! Some Types of Games just work really well, and so why completely reinvent, if there is part of a proven formula you can ethically use, and can genuinely add value to and improve, then use it (but take legal advice to avoid infringing other people’s rights – the tangible and karmic implications of legal disputes are not to be entered into lightly).

There are a number of classic examples of this, for instance, when Monopoly board game added a calculator to replace the physical money they found they had a massive hit product on their hands despite the fact that the original version of Monopoly had already been in the market for generations. This is reinvention, and there is no bigger example of successful reinvention than ‘Monopoly Here And Now’. If you want the inside track on how this game came to be, you can listen to our podcast interview with Richard Heayes the ex-Hasbro Games designer credited with the original idea:

https://playingatbusiness.libsyn.com/creating-best-selling-board-games-with-richard-heayes

Reinvention though doesn’t just need to apply to best selling games like Monopoly. Maybe there is an old fairground or arcade game you can rediscover and bring to market in a board games format, or maybe a game you played once as a child but haven’t seen for decades since. If it worked once, maybe it will work again!

We’ll be back next time with Feature No. 2 of best selling board games.

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