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Not really if I’m honest! We did play a lot of board games and card games because we went on a family camping holiday every year, so we would often take games there. Every Christmas we’d get a new board game, often one that was tied into a movie or TV show. My sister got a Garfield board game and it was quite disappointing, and I got a Home Alone 2 board game, which I was very excited about because it needed batteries… But the gameplay was extremely complicated! With So Wrong, It’s Right, we did a quiz on the radio ages ago called The Wrong Way Round Quiz. It was based on spoonerisng words – so swapping the first letters of answers around. My co-host is called Mollie King, so if she was the answer to a question you’d have to say Kollie Ming. I have a thing called cyclothymia. It’s like a watered down bipolar. It means I have waves of incredible productivity followed by a lowness where I feel like I’m never going to have another idea again. In those waves of productivity, I feel very alive with creative energy and feel inspired by things I see and hear. At some point, you feel like ‘BAM – I’ve got it!’ and at that point, I feel like I need to purge myself of the idea. In that space, I feel I’m able to accomplish things that ‘everyday me’ couldn’t.
We’ve likened the experience to a couple of guys taking up busking on Monday, then being signed by a major label for a five-record deal by Friday,” said Laurence Emmett, Co-Founder of Format Games. There's two PDFs available for this quiz. The first, anagram questions including the answers, the second is a PDF with just the questions. Matt, great to catch up. Before we dive into all things Format Games, how did you get into game design? Were you into games from a young age?After the initial announcement that we’re behind these games, they’ll live or die based on whether they’re good. That won’t be truer than when they land in other countries. I have zero clout in America, for example, so the Asmodee US team just cared about whether the games were good. We sold out in about a week and a half. Then, the real push to do more games came when we met with John Lewis following the success of Ansagrams. They said the most dangerous thing that could be said to me: “If you have any other ideas, let us know.” Earlier this year, television and Sony award-nominated radio presenter Matt Edmondson launched a new board game company called Format Games. My brother-in-law Laurence hasn’t got a creative bone in his body, but he’s fantastic at logistics. He was also going through a bit of a tough time with his cleaning business. It shut down because he couldn’t send cleaners to people’s homes during the pandemic. He had nothing to do and I had nothing to do, and our skill-sets matched up. Matt first entered the game space as the inventor of Big Potato’s Obama Llama, and last year he self-published Ansagrams.
Television and Sony Award-nominated radio presenter Matt Edmondson established himself as a board game inventor when he created the party game Obama Llama. Last year, he followed it up with the sold-out-success Ansagrams, which he published independently. The ones that do it really well are the games that have a fantastic mechanic at the heart of them, like Dobble. It means the licensed versions of Dobble, like Dobble Gruffalo, give you the best of both worlds; you get a fantastic game mechanic while introducing people to Julia Donaldson, or you’re introducing Gruffalo fans to a new fantastic game like Dobble. It’s a good partnership. Now Matt and his brother-in-law Laurence Emmett have founded Format Games and are launching two new games this year in the form of colour-mixing card game Egg Slam and trivia title, So Wrong It’s Right. Great stuff. Now you said there that self-publishing sounded hard, but fast-forward to today and you’ve launched your own games company in Format Games. What changed your mind? This product will be delivered directly from the supplier and so only home delivery is available. It will usually take 3 – 5 working days to be delivered.
We have a game coming out next year called Noggin – which I genuinely think is the best game I’ve ever played, not just invented! – and it has that same kind of thing going on.
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