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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. the standard dictionary (the original one) has approx 40 000 4-9 letter words, with a mix of US/UK spellings. 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 come up with games a lot, and I usually don’t do anything with them. When the pandemic hit, loads of my time got freed up. I was going to be making a TV show, that didn’t happen. I was doing radio but from home, so I had loads of extra time. I get bored very easily, so I set myself a couple of projects. One was to make an album, because why not?! It was a fun thing to experiment with. The other thing that kept me sane was one was to try and get one of my board game ideas made.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. 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. 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. 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? 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!
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’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. 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. 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.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. I would never sit down and say “I’m going to do a trivia game, what’s the twist?” The twist always comes first. 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.
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