Tag Archives: best selling board games

Deliver Suspense And Tension – 40/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Deliver Suspense And Tension – 40/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

In the same way that we love to watch TV shows that are filled with surprise and sudden shocks, so we love to play Games which have us on tenterhooks like Jenga. Just watch out for that tower tumbling, and tension levels rising before it goes!

We have research tested the game of Jenga many times with families, and there is a palpable level of tension with children, because the tower is a much more significant size if you are much smaller child than if you are an adult – to put it in context, the Jenga tower starts the game at around 28 centimetres, but can end up significantly higher, while the average height of a 6 year old in the UK is around 91cm…therefore the tower is just under 1/3 of the height of the child. All this arithmetic points towards the collapse of the tower being a major event for children, which builds even greater tension and anticipation for the inevitable collapse of the tower.

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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.

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.

Get People To Exercise Their Brains – 21/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Get people to exercise their Brains – 21/55 Features of Best-Selling Board Games

People like to stretch their Brains, and they especially like to prove they are smarter or know more than their friends and family, so brain teasing Games can work really well. There is a reason why Scrabble has been one of the best-selling games of all time, total sales reportedly exceed 150 million copies.

It’s not just Scrabble though – Boggle is another word game which has enjoyed considerable success over time. And of course, then there is the Sudoku phenomena when it seemed like everybody was buying games testing their numeric problem-solving ability.

There is no way you could describe these types of games as high-octane or as highly entertaining, but they do allow us to test our mental acuity, to prove how clever we are, to compete with others and to develop and sustain our brain power.

This type of game then offers much potential for high sales levels.

Chuck Some Technology In The Box – 17/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Chuck some Technology in the box – 17 of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Featuring the new technology of the moment can be a great way of driving Sales.

There’s no reason why you can’t add in a gameplay feature needing people to refer to / use their smartphones, social media or whatever else is the current hot technology.

The key point though is that whatever technology is added in needs to enhance the gameplay experience. Very simple mechanical technology can provide a thoroughly compelling gameplay, whereas sometimes having super high tech with the massive development costs that go along with that can look whizzy but be confusing or not deliver a great experience.

The way to have success with technology added to board games is to focus first and foremost on why people play board games, and how any tech can improve that play experience. People play board games for social interaction, so how can an added element make that social interaction better? For example, there have been several board games featuring a lie detector, and while the technology behind lie detectors and the efficacy of lie detectors is perhaps questionable in terms of accuracy, that almost doesn’t matter with social experience. The point is to deliver fun first and social interaction second.

Slap A License On It – 12/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Slap a license on it – 12 of 55 Features of Best-Selling Board Games

People buy brands they know and trust, they also buy merchandise based on loved programs, movies, comics and more. Sometimes licensed board games can become best sellers based on this. Often given as a gift to someone who has a particular affinity to a particular brand, licensed games are not always renowned for their high-quality gameplay.

There are though many co-branded Licensed games whereby a well known and often much-loved board games brand will have a version featuring a License. Some good examples of this would be the Disney Monopoly or Disney Trivial Pursuit editions produced by board games giant Hasbro in conjunction with Disney. The trick is normally in ensuring that there is a good fit between the licensed and the existing board games brand – for example, Monopoly with it’s family friendly image may not be well matched with merchandise for a gory horror movie! One of the best examples we have seen was the Risk board game edition with a Lord of the Rings license featuring the territories of Middle Earth, and unsurprisingly because of the fantastic synergy between the existing board game brand and license in that instance the product was a commercial success according to reports in the trade press at the time.

There are of course risks with Licenses, the most obvious risks are financial. Royalties and minimum guarantees can make even a successful game unprofitable. Moreover, utilising a License is not a guarantee of success. Just walk-through discount stores used as clearance channels for overstocks by Games companies and you will see plenty of Licensed Games in there at 25% of their original price!

Market The Hell Out Of It – 11 of 55 Features of Best Selling Board Games

Market The Hell Out Of It – 11 Of 55 Best Selling Board Games

Frankly, some games succeed because of the level of Marketing that goes behind them, if the Marketing stopped, the sales may stop, but if you have the money to do it in the first place, big Marketing spend often = big sales (although not always big profit!).

One of the quirks of the board games business is the overlap with the rest of the toy business (the toy business looks at games and puzzles as a sub-category of toys). This means that many toy companies also have some games and puzzles in their portfolio. The interesting thing to note here is that the marketing model for toys is all about dumping as much stock as possible on retail shelves and in e-commerce warehouses, and then promoting simple but compelling key product features to children via mass market media (both social media platforms and TV advertising (yep, TVCs are still a big part of toy company marketing plans).

The difference though between board games and the rest of toys is that toys are normally designed for children to play with on their own, with other people normally not required. Games are above all a social experience and are typically a parentally driven purchase, which is a very different communication target for advertising – parents want to hear about educational and developmental benefits and about creating golden family moments.

Those toy companies who also sell board games tend to follow the classic toy marketing method i.e. heavy stock dump into the market and a lot of marketing investment.

The reality is that long term success in board games is normally driven by organic year on year growth, but there is no doubt that you can shift a lot of boxes with heavy marketing investment!

Blend Multiple Gameplays – 10 of 55 Best Selling Board Games

Blend multiple gameplays – 10 of 55 Features of Best Selling Board Games

One of the challenges with some popular games is that they favour players with a particular aptitude, this means that the level of competition can be unequal, which doesn’t always encourage repeat play, which after all is the cornerstone of successful board games generally speaking.

The best example we can think of a classic game which blends different gameplays is Cranium. On one level you could argue that the core Cranium game was not that creative – featuring several already known gameplay patterns. But the magic of Cranium was in equalising out the gameplay so that someone with a particular aptitude i.e. for trivia or for drawing could not rule the roost because the game tested more than just one thing.

There was certainly something magic enough in Cranium for Hasbro to buy the company and brand for a reported $77m back in 2008!

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