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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. I initially took the idea to Lesley Singleton from Playtime PR. She was the only person I knew from the board game industry because she had sent me Bananagrams. She probably had that feeling of dread when she met me of ‘Oh no, another person who thinks they have a great idea for a board game!’ Then I thought, rather than switch the letters, what about if you had to ditch the letters? That was the fourth thing sorted. Then I thought, maybe there’s one element where you have to deliberately give the wrong answer. Now I have a quiz – and it’s a quiz where you could answer one question in five different ways.
With Ansagrams, it popped into my head fully formed. I just had the idea of ‘Anagrams are fun. You could solve those by taking the first letter of every answer.’ That’s as far as the thought went! We did a Dragons’ Den-style Zoom pitch to the Asmodee guys in the States and we were offered a global distribution deal that covers the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. They wanted the games I’ve mentioned, plus our newest one, Noggin. We can’t think of a better partner for global distribution than Asmodee. If this game has caught your attention, you’ve probably been drawn in by the appeal of a fun word game with friends. That’s understandable, word games have definitely become more popular lately. We've recently seen the rise of web-based apps like Wordle and Facebook’s Words with Friends. If you haven't played them, you've probably heard of them! If this game has caught your attention, you’ve probably been drawn in by the appeal of a fun word game with friends. That’s understandable, word games have definitely become more popular lately. We’ve recently seen the rise of web-based apps like Wordle and Facebook’s Words with Friends. If you haven’t played them, you’ve probably heard of them! Mean Girls from Big Potato is another great example of that. They’ve taken Truth Bombs – a great game with a brilliant mechanic – and they’ve put a different skin on it, but at its core is really strong game.Ansagrams and So Wrong, It’s Right are both unthreatening trivia games. The questions are quite easy, but you have to do something special with the answers. That’s the magic of these trivia games.
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. 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. It has to be a two-word answer to be a spoonerism, so I thought what if the words swapped around. So then I had two things! Then I thought you could just give the correct answer normally – so now I had three elements.You licensed Obama Llama to Big Potato. Did that process act as a bit of a crash course into the games industry? Well now I’m going to be counting down the days to its unveiling! I also wanted to ask; you’re a TV presenter, you’re a Radio 1 DJ… Do you think being famous has made it easier to successfully launch your own games? 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. I’ve played strategy games that have clever mathematics underpinning them, and I could never come up with one of those. They are genius! What I can do is identify a feeling that’s fun and find a way to give you lots of that feeling in a game. They told us we needed a distributor, so they introduced us to Asmodee. We really liked them, they said they could distribute the games in the UK for us and then we asked if we could also speak to their US office.
The quiz master will give them 30 seconds to figure out the word. If no one figures it out by then, there is a hint the quiz master can read to help them. If after another 30 seconds, no one can get the correct answer, no one wins the round. Once they have the answer they shout out ‘Ansagrams’ and if they are successful, they win the round and the card. If players do not succeed, they are frozen out, and if everyone gets frozen out, the card is discarded. I’ve got a few game ideas that will be coming in the next couple of years that are in that family space that will lend themselves to licensing in a really big way, in a similar way that Dobble does. You want a partnership whereby they want to partner with you because the game is good, and you want to partner with them because their brand is going to introduce more people to that game. letters from the words "moon starer" can be rearranged to give the word "astronomer". Our quiz offers anagrams on British cities, football clubs, Christmas words and famous British landmarks. In the UK, word game Ansagrams is now distributed by Asmodee to a number of major and indie retailers including John Lewis and Waterstones, while Egg Slam and So Wrong It’s Right make their high street debut exclusively at John Lewis for autumn/winter 2021. All three games will launch in other global territories through Asmodee in spring/summer 2022, along with a fourth new game, Noggin, which will also be available in the UK next year.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? Right! It did a funny thing to my head where I would know the answer, but I just couldn’t get there! It’s funny and I thought I should do that as a board game, but a spoonerism on its own isn’t enough.
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