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A Picture Tells A Thousand Words – 41/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

A Picture Tells a Thousand Words – 41/55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Drawing based Games have shifted lots of boxes! Pictionary has sold in the region of 40 million games since first being published in 1985 and has the rare honour of having been published by both toy giants – Hasbro and Mattel.

Over time there have been several other high selling board games which have featured drawing as part of the gameplay – Cranium being one of the most notable.

One point we have observed over time is that some people are better at drawing than others, so if you can find ways to make drawing games easier and more fun for people who are not good at drawing you may increase the size of the potential audience and therefore the commercial potential of your game.

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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.

Test Powers Of Deduction – 37 Of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Test Powers Of Deduction – 37 of 55 Features Of Best-Selling Board Games

Games like Guess Who, Battleship and Mastermind offer a light test of deductive skills (and sell in large quantities). Note the emphasis on ‘light’, the concept can be really simple, making something very complicated won’t necessarily be mass market.

Guess Who seems simple, but the mechanic/matrix of characters and variations behind it is surprisingly complicated. Battleship is very basic, but also highly compelling. Mastermind is not frankly speaking the most exciting board game in the world, but it has still sold millions of games over time.

What all these games have in common is their effect – this type of simple deductive thinking positively aids the cognitive development of children. So, while adults may not find these gameplays very compelling, for children they can be quite challenging and therefore particularly stimulating.

Guess Who is reported to sell around 2million games each year, Battleship is so big that a Hollywood movie starring Liam Neeson & Rihanna based on this classic game grossed more than $300m at the global box office and Mastermind has sold tens of millions of copies over time. Commercially speaking, simple deductive games are major news.

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.

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.

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