Creating a “Board” Game

For a brief, magical, heady period in the late 2010’s I had the unique opportunity to work for Hasbro on a pretty exceptional brief:

Use data, strategy, and design to extract trends from the fever dream that was peak Youtube and transform them into real-world board games designed to go viral.

This seemingly simple task lead to countless hours of prototyping, play testing, and pie-facing. One particular concept rose to the top and made it onto store shelves: Awkward Hugs. In retrospect, a game founded on a violation of personal space was probably never really going to go the distance commercially. But hey, I’m sure they said the same thing about Hungry Hungry Hippos.*

It’s a bit of a hard experience to sum up in a blurb, but I include it here because it reflects the sort of work I like to do. Work that goes beyond billboards and TVCs (though those are great too) and manifests in unlikely forms. I like to make work that possesses an irreverent freewheeling spirit, while still being grounded in something concrete.

So if you’re curious, I’d love to talk about this further and how we approached one of the more unusual creative asks of my career. I’d also be happy to go further into detail about the time I got blasted with a super soaker and pie’d in the face in a client meeting.

*Let the record show, Awkward Hugs technically ranks higher than Hungry Hungry Hippos on BoardGameGeek with a crushing .5 point margin, 4.6 to 4.1.