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Turn Your Players Into Detectives – 36 of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Turn Your Players Into Detectives – 36 of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Classic sleuthing Games such as Clue/Cluedo, Mysteries Of Old Peking and 221B Baker Street put people into the shoes of Detectives, but so do more modern iterations such as the CSI games launched some years back. This genre is not going away, either in terms of general
everyday culture, TV programming or Board Games.

There is something so fundamentally appealing about sleuthing as an entertainment theme. But more than that, there is also a great fit between the theme of detective work and board game play.

In more recent times, Escape The Room has become the modern incarnation of this type of deductive reasoning game, with both top selling games in a box, as well as physical Escape The Room venues to visit.

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Give People An Excuse To Get In Close Proximity – 35/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Give People An Excuse To Get In Close Proximity – 35/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

For a variety of reasons(!), people just love to be close to each other. The all-time classic example of this is of course the game Twister.

Originally at launch, Twister because successful at least partly because host of the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson played it with actress Eva Gabor, leading to the publishers being accused of selling “sex in a box”!

On a more innocent level though generations of children have enjoyed trying to twist themselves around and collapsing in a heap together when they couldn’t quite make it.

So, whether you create a game based on facilitating physical intimacy, or just on having innocent fun for kids there could well be success in your game’s physicality!

Give People An Excuse To Be Silly – 34/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Give people an excuse to be silly – 34/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Some people act silly naturally, but others need an excuse to act up – and board games can provide that. Children quite easily act in a silly way, because it is enjoyable and hilarious, but a lot of adults frankly speaking are a bit uptight!

There are some timeless classic gameplays which basically allow adults to be silly – the most obvious example would be Charades. There have been many versions of Charades as a boxed game. In more recent years there have been a number of games which are based on acting up in a silly way – Pie Face, Mega Mouth and many more. These types of games which have silly actions more easily lend themselves to viral word of mouth, because people are more likely to share a picture or video of someone doing something ridiculous than they are to share an image of people sat around a board rolling dice.

Deliver An Entertaining Memory Test – 33/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Deliver An Entertaining Memory Test – 33/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Testing people’s memory shifts Game boxes! There are so many games which have memorising data or information at the heart of the gameplay. Examples of memory based games include Ravensburger’s fantastically successful Memory, as well Orchard Toys Shopping List game and many more.

An interesting tweak on the formula of memory tests can make for a commercially successful game.

Create A Game With Funny Animals – 32 Of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Create A Game With Funny Animals – 32 of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

One of the truisms of the toy & games business is that kids just love Animals. So many of the toys and games out there feature cute & funny animals in some way.

Some of the best-selling skill and action games for children are based on Animals. Elefun, Buckaroo, Hungry Hippos and many more all feature funny animals doing funny things.

If you can play to the character of the animal, even better i.e. the ‘Doggie Doo’ game where the Dog literally farts and defecates is much loved by kids around the world (and has sold in huge quantities).

It’s not just those type of plastic skill and action games though – cardboard games are also popular when featuring animals.

The point is that there is a limited number of long-term proven themes for toys & games for children – and animals is one of those major themes. This doesn’t mean that you just have to slap an animal on the game and it will sell, you still need a well-crafted game with strong gameplay, but if you add in animals as part of the formula you are probably more likely to achieve success!

Sneak Some Education Into The Gameplay – 31 of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Sneak Some Education Into The Gameplay – 31 of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Creating fun play patterns based on educationally beneficial topics, content and theme can lead to massive sales success. If you look at classic perennial games which have been good sellers over a long period of time, a large proportion of these games are fundamentally educational. For example, Scrabble has sold over 150million copies over time…that’s a massive sales volume. This type of long-term high sales can’t be driven just by marketing spend – marketing spend may help, but it is only possible where the concept of the game and the play experience are genuinely compelling.

It’s not just Scrabble though – Boggle, Upwords and Rummikub have sold many games over time.

The reality is that ‘edutainment’ products can be really successful. What drives this is the desire for parents to play with their children and spend quality time, while also aiding their child’s development. This purchase driver is not limited to board games, we see the same things with Science kits, puzzles and other toy products.

Give People A Knowledge Test – 30/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Give People A Knowledge Test – 30/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Trivia is a long-established board games genre. In fact, according to Board Game Geek, the first trivia game was The Traveller’s Tour Through The United States which released c. 1822.

Proving how much we know is a really interesting game play format. Trivial Pursuit is of course the best-known trivia game as well as the highest selling with over 100 million copies sold since launch back in 1981. When Hasbro purchased the brand back in 2008 for a reported $80m from their long-time licensor Horn Abbot, you can bet that Horn Abbot saw the value in games based on testing the knowledge of players.

The additional advantage of trivia games is just how easy they are to extend – if we again look at Trivial Pursuit, there have been many different versions testing both general and specific knowledge including a Family edition, a Disney version, Star Wars editions and much more.

The challenge today of course is that there are so many trivia games out there already, and the format is considered to be completely done i.e. hard to tweak or twist to add any real innovation. That being said though, we have seen that every few years someone does manage to tweak the formula and create something new compelling and commercially appealing based on giving players a knowledge test.

Create A Game Around Something Kids Love – 29/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Create A Game Around Something Kids Love – 29/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Themes are really important for board games companies. Creating games around themes your target consumer is interested in has to be a good way to go.

The most prominent and successful example we can think of this is Candyland. Since 1949, over 50 million games have been sold.

Making a game around Candy (sweets/lollies/bon bons etc), seems like an obvious hit from the start, because Kids just LOVE ‘Candy’! The gameplay in itself is not exactly cutting edge, but it is fun and has survived the test of time due to a theme that is so loved by children.

Kids don’t only love ‘candy’ though. What else do kids really love that you could make a game out of?

Change The Format – 24 of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Change The Format – 24 of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Let’s face it, this is not the most imaginative of options, but it is arguably the most proven and the most effective path to creating top selling products.

There are many examples we could use, but one which seems to fit really well with this factor is Yahtzee. Poker is a generic game, and although Poker sets seem to have a moment in the headlines every decade or so, it is hard to have anything ownable or unique with Poker sets. You could run licensed Poker sets perhaps, but then you could do a licensed version of anything arguably!

What Yahztee does though is to take a known, generic game play and twists the format to create something more unique and ownable, which can then have a brand built around it. Since launch in 1956, Yahtzee has sold tens of millions of copies, so there is no doubting it is a best-selling game.

The question then becomes what other established Gameplay patterns could be out there just waiting for you to apply a format twist to? Now for everyone who has worked in the games business for a while there is at least one, if not ten, stories of someone who thinks they have reinvented Chess, but these ‘reinventions’ are often a bit lame, make the game less accessible and slower to play and don’t really add value. If you could reinvent Chess in a way which makes it quicker, easier to access, unique and can apply a brand over it you could find a best-seller. But there are of course many other game play formats out there just waiting for adaptation.

In addition, sometimes a company has an existing successful game that has been under extended. Brand extensions are a massive part of the board games business – any board games expert will tell you that – so if you have a successful perennial game there might just be a format change which will allow you to drive incremental sales. But remember Reece’s Law of Brand Extensions – a realistic target for a brand extension game should be 1/3^rd of the original games sales. Like all rules there are exceptions to this rule, but you can’t just expect to keep churning out new formats of existing games with no limits, eventually sales start to reduce or cannibalise, but if you set realistic expectations you could just win big.

LET PEOPLE PLAY A ROLE – 22nd OF 55 FEATURES OF BEST-SELLING BOARD GAMES

Let people play a role – 22nd of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Board games can offer escapism for players. Indeed, before the advent of video games, this was a major part of playing board games – getting so ‘into’ the gameplay that all else outside the game disappeared. Nowadays of course it is harder to get people this deeply immersed and focused on a board game due to all the other noise and gadgetry around us.

But roleplaying can be a powerful way for people to learn about others, to empathise, to fantasise, and merely to have fun. Dungeons and Dragons is a classic example of how taking on a role and stepping into a fictional world can be very compelling. Today Dungeons and Dragons is heading towards the 50th anniversary of launch, and the underlying strength of the gameplay pattern and mechanisms remain as strong as ever.

At the lighter end of the spectrum that ol’ favourite Game of Life stands tall. Players take on a new persona and follow their character through life’s ups and downs, through life stages and try to head into a happy retirement. Game of Life has sold tens of millions of copies since launch back in 1960, and several generations have enjoyed playing their way through their own life journey with this iconic board game.

Game of Life proves that role playing doesn’t have to be for hard core gamers only.

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