(Image courtesy of Studio71)
The whole truth about Half Truth, the just-released board game from nerd gods Ken Jennings and Richard Garfield and content company Studio71, is that despite its significant charms, it was made for a different time than the current one locking down most households.
The game, which was sent to its Kickstarter backers a few weeks ago, debuted today in big-box retailers and specialty game stores, if any of those remain open.
Half Truth has much to recommend it, starting with its creators. Jennings is the highest-earning player all time in game show Jeopardy, and a serious trivia hound who’s written multiple best-sellers on the subject. Garfield is one of the great tabletop game designers, best known for Wizards of the Coast mega-hit Magic the Gathering among about 50 credits.
The game’s conceit, according to Garfield, is to allow people who aren’t hard-core trivia buffs to compete against those who are, and to do it in an easy-to-learn, quick-to-play format. Each card features a trivia question with six possible answers. Players place chits on up to three of those answers that they believe are correct.
There are bonuses for getting more than one answer correct, but if any of the chosen answers is wrong, the player gets nothing. That adds a useful layer of risk-versus-reward that can pay off even for a cautious and only moderately knowledgable player. The one player who accumulates the most points after three rounds wins.
“It feels great to get this game out at last,” said Garfield, whom I interviewed with Jennings a few weeks ago, early in the pandemic. “It’s been in the works for a long time. Every time I touched it and looked over the questions, I felt like it was something really special.”
Jennings, too, was exulting in a finished project.
“It’s very exciting for us to have this peanut-butter-and-chocolate moment,” Jennings said. “It was a lot of fun.”
Less certain is whether the game can win big in the current climate, Studio71 CEO Dan Weinstein acknowledged to me during a recent webinar that we did together.
The company has had a series of successes with spinoff games tied to its clients and others, beginning with video games connected to the kid-friendly Filipino influencer Guava Juice and then a board game built around the video game series The Binding of Isaac.
The focus has been on creating games built around well-known brands, whether from the media company’s own stable of about 600 online influencers, prominent celebrities, or well-known properties in other media.
To further reduce risk, Weinstein said the company relies on Kickstarter campaigns to assess audience interest, create a group of ambassadors, and provide startup capital.
Thus, a trivia game built by Garfield and Jennings seemed like an easy win, especially after an August, 2019 Kickstarter campaign that attracted about $327,000 from nearly 8,900 backers. The campaign hit its initial goal three hours after launch.
But six months after the Kickstarter closed, the pandemic turned everything upside down. Even for board games, now in demand from bored households across the country, business got more complicated. Yes, in some ways, Half Truth is well positioned for success.
“Really, the No. 1 thing helping the game is that a lot of people were going to go off the edge with one more jigsaw puzzle,” Jennings said, perhaps only half in jest.
But the game still faces a steeplechase’s worth of unanticipated hurdles.
“There's a couple of things to unpack in this,” Weinstein said. “Some of it’s particular to us. And some of this is is about board games in general. As one would imagine, manufacturing, shipping and distribution from China has been challenging, especially for a little guy like us.”
The company was able to procure and ship enough copies of Half Truth for all the backers, who got their copies about a month ago, and to send to Amazon.
But other parts of the distribution plan are in tatters. The two main retail channels for Half Truth are big-box chains, such as Target
The big retailers, Weinstein acknowledged, are busy stocking their shelves with toilet paper, food and other staples. Adding a new game to their offerings is low on the priority list.
As for the specialty shops, many have been forced to close or dramatically curtail operations, especially the kinds of communal game nights (in a minor irony, those nights often feature Garfield’s magnum opus, Magic the Gathering) that bring in lots of game-friendly buyers.
And finally, Garfield and Jennings acknowledged that questions in their game aren’t for everyone. They do cover a wide array of topics, from pop culture to sports to history and beyond, and don’t require particularly deep knowledge for an average (and conservative) player to be regularly competitive.
But the Half Truth target audience is more the groups of adults who might gather at a to play something like Cards Against Humanity or Exploding Kittens than cloistered family units with young kids.
That includes even Garfield’s own family, with twins under the age of 3. So he’s acutely aware of what might come if an expansion ever becomes possible.
“If the game gets played the way we hope it will, the first thing is more questions,” Garfield said. “The questions are really fun, but they are exhaustible. (One potential expansion or specialty version of the game) is for kids.’
Asked to predict its prospects in the suddenly changed atmosphere, Weinstein could only say, “We don't know. Is there an audience for it at the moment? Is it something that's going to break through the clutter, or is it limited? Fortunately, we got wave one of Half Ttruth out and delivered into retail, into Amazon and wherever it needed to be, pre-the world shutting down. So we at least have the first run of it, and then we'll see what what happens.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2020/05/06/half-truth-trivia-game-ken-jennings-richard-garfield-studio71-challenges/
2020-05-06 19:59:20Z
CAIiEJqrF5FAPrOr3Oa1YMFxw4AqFQgEKg0IACoGCAowrqkBMKBFMMGBAg
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Ken Jennings’ And Richard Garfield’s New Game Faces Non-Trivial Task Of Succeeding Despite Pandemic - Forbes"
Post a Comment