Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Planet Money from NPR. Legend has it, there was a Canadian couple in the 1950s who liked to play this game called yacht. They owned a yacht. They play the game on their yacht. But as far as I could tell, that is all the yacht involved in this game called yacht.
Yes. Yacht was a dice game. You roll a bunch of dice. You try to make sets and pairs and whatnot. And apparently, friends of the Canadian yachters were like, this yacht game rules. You should publish it. Make some money. Maybe buy another yacht.
Yeah, why not? And so the unnamed Canadian sold the game idea to a game entrepreneur who then made the very wise decision to not sell the game as Yacht. He changed the name, of course, to Yahtzee. Yahtzee! Nobody's going to buy and yell Yacht. Come on. And we share this little tale because a good title or a bad title will absolutely sink a really great game.
That was the very serious warning we got previously on Planet Money Makes a Board Game. Let's catch everyone up real quick. We're making a game.
We have partnered with the game company Exploding Kittens to try and design a game inspired by the Nobel Prize winning economics paper, The Market for Lemons.
That paper is literally about asymmetric information in the market for used cars. But broadly, it's about how making deals when one side knows more than the other causes chaos, distrust, and ultimately destroys a market.
In our game version, players have hands of cards and they're offering each other deals, trying to get the best cards. But they can trick their friends into accepting terrible cards because asymmetric information. You only ever have to show part of the deal.
We chose to make a mass appeal party game that sneakily brings the economics, the partial information, the mounting distrust, the spiral into joyful chaos. Instead of a complex, hardcore, nerdy economics game. And that is because we're hoping that this game can be our Trojan horse into reporting and learning from inside a world that no other Planet Money project has gone.
The real shelves at real big box retail stores.
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Chapter 2: Why is choosing a game name so important?
We are surprised to learn how unscientific that process can be.
Plus, by the end of the episode, we will have a name and a theme. And we have saved some spots in our deck of cards for you all, you listeners. Your ideas will end up illustrated and part of the Planet Money game. Imagine rubbing that in your friend's face as a game night. Stay tuned.
Okay, we are on a mission to use the Planet Money game to crack open next-tier access to the world of big box retail. Imagine getting inside the real Shark Tank rooms where a single pitch could result in the shipping containers full of game orders. But the problem was...
What really was the Planet Money game? We had a prototype and we'd collectively done thousands of hours of playtesting, which you all helped us with. Thank you very much. But really, all we had to show for it was a set of rules.
Yeah, I mean, to be clear, we're proud of those rules. They explain a card game that is subtly complex and even more subtly sprinkles in our big asymmetric information economics idea. But it's true. This was not yet a product that you could put on a shelf at Walmart or Target.
But apparently, this is how Exploding Kittens works. During the prototyping phase, they seemed 0% concerned with the theme of our game. Like, they didn't worry about the pictures on the cards, about whether our players should imagine they were used car sellers or fruit vendors running a literal market for lemons.
No, their strategy was the game should work without any of that, and only then do we start thinking about theming and naming. And then one day, we got word.
Okay, so let's talk about... It was time.
Yeah, so just to be clear, we're preparing for the highest stakes part of this entire process? Is that what we're about to do?
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Chapter 3: What challenges did the team face in naming the game?
And oh, it's none of those things. Bummer. Out. Not getting it. I don't know if I fully buy this, but welcome to the world of choosing a name and a theme for Big Box.
Yeah, because we were not just choosing something that would appeal to a potential customer. We were choosing something that Walmart and Target think will appeal to the potential customer. After all, they are the ones who will decide whether to order and carry the Planet Money game.
And now, in that highest stakes part of the process meeting, Exploding Kittens was about to show us some potential themes and names that they think might get us on the shelf. Get ready for... Oop, sharing is not turned on. Hold on, let me hit allow. I think I... Got it.
Stephanie Pesta is in charge of the art and design part of this process, and she was ready to present us with three possible names and themes. But first, she wanted to share a bit about how her team takes a prototype like ours and starts to find a name and theme.
So the way the art team works is we'll play the game to get a general understanding of like the emotions you feel as like you go through the core gameplay mechanics. And for this one, what we really loved was the training aspect, right? That's where the tension is. That's where the excitement is.
Yeah. So remember, in our game, the players take turns entertaining deals from the other players. That deal might include great cards or terrible cards or mediocre cards or all of those things. But because you only have to show one of the cards, it turns the straightforward market into a chaos pit of distrust and betrayal and often shouting. I feel like we've shouted at each other a bit.
A little.
And we really wanted to jump off of that feeling, those cards and the excitement of like trading something that could be really funny, but also really exciting to have. So we thought about people who trade a lot and we're like, oh, my gosh, sports trading.
Sports trading. You could imagine each of our players is a sports agent or a team trading and acquiring good and bad athletes.
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Chapter 4: How does the game mechanic relate to asymmetric information?
To be the best salesman, characters can be stock traders, car salesmen, street vendors and other famous deal traders. But imagine it's cats instead of people exploding kittens. Let's bring animals into it.
It is dawning on us that we clearly have entered, I guess we'll call it the art of game selling. Like will cats in suits sell better than ketchup bottles with crowns? But we have no idea. How are we supposed to know this?
Yeah, you know, this is really the explorational phase. So right now, this part of the process is a lot of like seeing what sticks. Like this one feels right. This one will really, really, really work in retail. We're kind of looking to capture that feeling.
feels right, what sticks, these are not metrics that work with our econ data brains. It's like when someone tries to give you a recipe and they just say, oh, you'll know when it's done. Like, no, tell me how long and at what temperature and what order the things go in.
Yes, that is maddening. I do hate that. But exploding kittens say this is the method that works for them. It's better, they say, for them than like a formal corporate focus group situation where you might drown in too much data. Sounds like a good problem to me.
But apparently their process is to now just let these three ideas sit and see if anything ends up like one of those earworm songs that you just cannot stop thinking about. And that's it.
That is pretty much where we left the meeting.
Thank you for all the work you've put into this. I'm so excited to see more. And our reactions are, if we're not giving you the reactions you want, it's just because we don't know what we're doing.
This is great.
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Chapter 5: What themes and names were proposed for the game?
When you get close, does our game very quickly pique the customer's curiosity somehow?
And here, amidst all the trust your gut, use the force Luke stuff, Jamie brings us a sweet, sweet numerical oasis because she says we can try to reason through this a bit. So what will pique a big box customer's curiosity? Well, who is that customer, we should ask?
The number one consumer that walks into these big boxes are generally millennial women, probably who are owning the household purchasing dollars, who are between the ages of 28 and 44. So that's your core customer.
Our core customer is, it is basically you, Erica. You are the core customer. It's me.
I feel seen. Yep, that's me.
Age-wise, at least, it's also me a little bit.
So there is data supporting the fact that people go into a big box retailer to buy games for two reasons. One, for game night that night with their friends or family.
Game night that night?
That night.
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Chapter 6: How does the target audience influence game naming?
Or maybe you were one of the millions of 80s kids traumatized by NBC's Unsolved Mysteries.
Is Bigfoot real? An elaborate ongoing hoax. We wanted to believe in the 80s and 90s. And look, maybe we're just grasping for logic inside this wild exploding kittens process. But if the core customers walking into Big Box are millennials, we could do worse than picking a theme and a name that might cut to their 80s and 90s hearts.
It all comes down to three feet and three seconds inside a store. A gut reaction to a name and a theme. So what would Jamie's gut reaction be to ours?
Okay, so here's what we in Exploding Kittens are thinking. Erica?
It's going to be called, sell me a Sasquatch.
Sell me a Sasquatch? Yeah. Okay.
Listening back, it does sound a little like Jamie hates this idea, but her face does not say that. She seems unsure, not hateful. Just, like, let me process this. She's a thinker. Let me do this again.
Sell me a Sasquatch! Sell me a Sasquatch! Is it cute? We don't know how cute it is yet, do we? It's cute.
It's very cute. It's very cute. Yes. In fact, Exploding Kittens had mocked up some cover art. So picture a vending machine and jammed inside, pressed up against the glass, is a very sweet, very cute Sasquatch.
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Chapter 7: What insights did the game consultant provide?
This is great. This is great.
We were feeling about as good as we could possibly feel about cracking our name and our theme and turning our yacht into a Yahtzee. And that is when.
So let's let's talk about what we all kind of agreed on a few months ago, which was sell me a Sasquatch.
Ilan Lee and Thor Ritz from Exploding Kittens called another meeting.
I still really love that name and that theme. We ran into a problem with mostly with the international teams. What? They don't know what a Sasquatch is. Hold on. Hold on.
They don't have Sasquatches in Europe. They do not have Sasquatches in Europe, he says. How much of our, like, what are we expecting, like, the international audience to buy? Like, you know.
Yeah. It's typically about 20% of sales.
Okay.
No, that's not nothing. Are you sure they don't know about the Yeti? I mean, I'm not sure they don't know about the Yeti, but sell me a Yeti. No, no, no. Didn't roll off as well.
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Chapter 8: What was the final decision on the game name and theme?
And then the game where you imagine being a horrible therapist has been doing well in Germany.
And there are several other markets where it doesn't perform as well yet. Interesting.
Obviously, Austria is where Freud is from. You know, therapy, Freud.
It's funny that you mentioned that because I think within two weeks of us announcing the launch, we were contacted by the Freud Museum asking if they could sell it in their gift shop. Yeah.
But, okay, the now-untitled Planet Money game, is it really worth rethinking the whole name for Europe?
Well, Yuri says there is reason to take this seriously.
So I think overall our expectations are quite high. Oh. In Germany, there's this game fair called Spiel. It takes place every year in Essen. Gigantic. Exactly. So we did have the game there this year in October, and it was actually quite well received.
All right. We're not throwing anything at each other with this game. So are the Italians and Spaniards going to not like it?
No, I think they'll be fine.
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