Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Its outer box boasts that Ansagrams takes 30 minutes to play and 2 minutes to learn. Whilst this may be true for some, I’d recommend learning by doing and having the first round be a trial round. 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. 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.
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. Great online store for board games. They always arrive perfectly and undamaged which is important to me. 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! Well, I love formats. Most of things I do creatively in my life are based around formats. I don’t think I’m particular good at free-form stuff, but if someone says “We’ve got a problem with a quiz show, how do we fix it?”, my brain can figure that stuff out. 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.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. 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! 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? There's two PDFs available for this quiz. The first, anagram questions including the answers, the second is a PDF with just the questions. 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.
Let’s look at Format Games’ debut line-up. Ansagrams and So Wrong, It’s Right are both fun twists on trivia games. Did you consciously set out to bring something new to the trivia space? 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. 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. I bashed out the questions in a couple of days, but if a graphic designer watched me try and design it, they would’ve found it hilarious. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’ve always been keen to learn, so using YouTube and TikTok I figured out how to make it. Also, through people knowing my personality because of the radio or having played my previous games, they trust that I like board games and I know what I’m doing. In that respect it’s easier.We caught up with Matt to find out how a career creating formats for TV and radio proved the prefect prep for a pivot into party games. 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. Because of my job on Radio 1, I spend a lot of time creating features and games for the show, many of which are the sorts of mechanics you’d expect to find in board games. Another part of my life is trying to come up with TV quiz shows, and these jobs all boil down to creating killer formats that are easy to understand and fun to play. Matt, thanks for taking time out for this – it’s been a lot of fun. To bring things full circle – you mentioned at the start about having a bad time with a Home Alone 2 board game. Are licensed games something you want to explore with Format Games? I would never sit down and say “I’m going to do a trivia game, what’s the twist?” The twist always comes first.
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. the standard dictionary (the original one) has approx 40 000 4-9 letter words, with a mix of US/UK spellings. 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. Earlier this year, television and Sony award-nominated radio presenter Matt Edmondson launched a new board game company called Format Games. The idea that someone would say ‘we have this movie, turn it into a game’, I’d love that! I’d find that joyful. That said, the big question with a licensed game is: Is the game going to be any good? I don’t want people to have the experience I had with the Home Alone 2 game.
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? It often starts with simple ideas that you then build structure around. Look at Obama Llama; it’s two things rhyming… Britney Spears using garden shears. On its own, that’s not a game, so that’s why you have to build a world around that concept. That’s what I’m drawn to: super accessible, mainstream party games. He said: “If you design it, I’ll find a way of getting it made and out there.” It was a fun experiment for us, so we made a game called Ansagrams which had been in my head for a while. It’s a very simple trivia game where you get five questions and you have to write down the first letter of each answer. Then, like a Countdown Conundrum, you have to unjumble them to create another word. First person to do that wins the card. 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. Play continues with a different quiz master so that everyone has a roughly equal chance to play. The end-goal is to use the cards you win to spell out a 3-letter word with your winning cards.
Zatu has an excellent range of games and for most of them the best prices too. Delivery is always fast and I have never received a game in bad condition. 10/10 would recommend. 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. the NASPA dictionary is the official dictionary for Scrabble play in the United States and Canada. It has approx 117 000 words. Genuinely, brace yourselves! It is the single best game I have ever played ever. It’s so good. If it doesn’t become the biggest game in the world, there will have been an injustice. I could play it every day and never get bored of it.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. Not sure what game to buy next? Buy a premium mystery box for two to four great games to add to your collection! Buy Premium Box » If you’re only interested in receiving the newest games this is the box for you; guaranteeing only the latest games! Buy New Releases Box » Matt Edmondson first entered the game space as the inventor of Big Potato’s Obama Llama, and last year he self-published Ansagrams. 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.
Great Deal 
New Comment