How One Family Built a Game to Fight Phone Addiction

Jason Hsieh (00:42)
Welcome back to another episode of Toy Business Unboxed podcast. Today I’m joined by Chip, the founder and CEO of Storyastic and inventor behind The Ranking, which is a conversational party game created to help people to tech less and talk more. So today we’ll talk about his journey span across many different industries besides the toys and game industry as well, and how he has really built a line of wonderful products focusing on something that we all are craving right now, which is some real world connections.

So thank you so much for joining us on the podcast and sharing your journey today.

Chip Brown (01:15)
Thanks, Jason. My pleasure.

Jason Hsieh (01:16)
So for our audience that’s not familiar with your journey and haven’t heard of your company yet, can you kind of go back and kind of share your origin story on how do you even got in and creating all the wonderful game that you currently have?

Chip Brown (01:28)
Yeah, I’ll do a brief background on me, just kind of a flyover and then then the reason why we made the company. So my wife and I what they call a Disney couple. We met at Disney 30 years ago. So I was a producer for The Lion King on Broadway and I worked in the park before that. My wife’s a Disney imagineer. And then I ended up doing a tech startup where I was partners with Mark Cuban and then

Ended up in publishing, the kind of the thing that was the last to make the digital shift. I did most recently in my career up until about nine years ago. And then we were out to dinner with our kids at a restaurant and they had us look around the restaurant and how everybody in the place was staring at their phones.

Jason Hsieh (02:04)
And so…

Chip Brown (02:04)
My daughter, who’s the oldest of the three, said, you know, it doesn’t matter if we know how to have a conversation with people if they’re all staring at their phones.

And so you know, not everybody has a Disney Imagineer for a parent. So we’ve always kind of said like even on road trips in the car, we would say, okay, you can’t watch anything on a screen until the sun sets. So you might have to fill, you know, six or eight or ten hours with something that’s real world when all you’re doing is sitting still. And so the idea of gamifying mundane moments is something that we’ve just

Been innately been able to do as a family. And so we sort of felt like we needed to the challenge from our kids was to sort of create a toolbox that would help other families and friends tech less and talk more. And so we played with a whole bunch of different ideas, kind of under the guise of “edutainment”, which was the phrase we used to use back in the probably the 90s but maybe even 80s.

But we just realized that it needs to be a carrot rather than a stick. That most people, let’s say if half of the people recognize that they would like to do less screen time, half of those people would fall off the wagon because it’s just too difficult to say no tech at the table and then try to do that over and over and over again. Just even the parents’ pockets are buzzing and so we wanted something that would not be an admonishment, but that would be the same craving that’s pulling people into the doom scroll.

It’s a good urge. It’s a desire to be known and to belong and to fit in community. So we wanted to use that same urge and we did it by gamifying conversation with The Ranking.

Jason Hsieh (03:26)
I see that’s also the first product.

Chip Brown (03:28)
That was the first game

And there’s now I think fifteen SKUs of it. You know, the premise

Jason Hsieh (03:33)
That’s a lot of different variations.

Chip Brown (03:35)
Is really simple. There’s just always one topic and four choices. And so rather than saying, let’s work on your communication skills, let’s work on your relationships, it’s not that. It’s externally facing singles people are used to liking and listing. So this just says one topic, four choices, you put in your order. Let’s say it’s season, spring, summer, winter, fall. You put in your favorite order, I have to guess your order.

And so there’s always at least one ranker and one guesser. And there’s four different ways to play it. So there’s an icebreaker mode if you don’t know each other too well. There’s teams of two, so you only need one wingman. This is like the newlywed game. You have to know one person and then everybody in the room gets to know each other that way. There’s a two big teams like a family feud mode, and then also there’s a spotlight mode where there’s one ranker and the whole room guesses that person’s order. And then you just change the ranker around the room.

Jason Hsieh (04:20)
Do you need to get the exact order correct?

Chip Brown (04:22)
Well, you get a point for each one that lines up. So you can get you know two you know, one, two or four points. You can’t get three because if you get three then automatically the fourth one. Right. So that’s this game and like so you see there’s just some sample cards there.

Like I said, there’s four different ways to play it. So, you know, it sort of shows here, and I can get you images of all this, but those are the kind of the four game modes.

Icebreaker, Spotlight, Teams of Two, and Bigger Teams. And then so that’s the main game. And then there’s like an after dark edition. So this

Game has already 50 everyday life cards, 50 leisure time cards, and 50 adulting cards, yellow. And then this one has

Girls night cards, guys night cards, relationship goals cards, and risky business cards. So it’s just different ways to get at the game cards.

So different ways to play it and then there’s like I think 13 SKUs of what we call On The Go, right? So this is like girls’ night. I don’t know, kind of the reflective

Jason Hsieh (05:14)
Hmm, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chip Brown (05:15)
Guy’s night, you know, relationship goals.

Each of these comes with a pad, 54 cards, a pad, and it’s got 50 cards plus four bonus cards, the score pad and the instructions, and then the case itself also doubles as a stand. There’s a little integrated stand.

Jason Hsieh (05:32)
It is also a stand. Okay.

Chip Brown (05:33)
We have like pop culture, sports and outdoors, adulting, like

Jason Hsieh (05:38)
So many.

Chip Brown (05:39)
Refills of more everyday life.

Jason Hsieh (05:42)
Yeah.

Which one is the best seller out of all the variation?

Chip Brown (05:46)
The girls’ night sells well, risky business, more everyday life ’cause that’s kind of all ages and stages. This faith pack sells pretty well, like in the South and the Midwest. Then we have like a greatest hits. So there are stores that only carry this SKU. And then this this been doing online as a print and play since COVID. Yeah. But we had some store accounts that asked to have you know a Christmas one and we had already done it for four years, so

That was really easy to do. This was this last Q4 last year. Yeah, so different ways to play it. And then we have other games that kind of use that same other party games, as they say, that uses those same kind of rules. Like this one is called Really Good, Really Bad. And it’s even simpler rather than going A B C D and figuring out your order. You just have to figure out from a stratum of really good to really bad how are you going to rate something.

So it might be these are things that people love or hate or love to hate. So for instance, one might say Taylor Swift, right? And then it doesn’t matter if I like her or don’t like her, I have to guess whoever the ranker is and whatever their orders. So that’s even simpler than the rank game. So it’s just very quick. You learn these games in like 10 or 15 seconds. And then you’re just up and playing. And the recipe is community plus competition, right? So the community is sort of the

You know, make everybody feel good and fit in, but everybody wants to win. So the people love this game because it’s about me. I get to share about myself and talk about myself. But the competition part means I only get points by thinking about you, not me. So

Jason Hsieh (07:11)
Yeah

Chip Brown (07:12)
You’ve got like let’s say a 16 year old brother and an eight-year-old sister. That 16 year old wants to win. He has to think like his sister when it’s her turn. Yeah. Yeah. And if you’re in a party situation, maybe you have quieter people, they’re kind of like

Sure about this, but it’s a really simple construct that sort of levels the playing field so that everybody has a chance to, you know, be known.

Jason Hsieh (07:32)
Have you translated this to several different languages yet?

Chip Brown (07:36)
Yeah, we’re in the process of doing that now. I think I met you actually in Nuremberg in January. So we’ve just now been expanding internationally, so we’re doing all the translation work. And then we also created I think you probably saw our game Stack. This one was

Jason Hsieh (07:49)
Yes yes this one I just saw.

Chip Brown (07:51)
There’s a finalist

For the Toy Award in Nuremberg.

Jason Hsieh (07:54)
Congratulations.

Chip Brown (07:55)
Thank you. And so the idea here was like when we were gonna go to to Germany, we thought, okay, well, let’s make some games that aren’t language dependent, right? And so this game is quite simple, you’re just trying to get four in a row. Yeah, you you have to play the small ones before you can play the large ones. And then if you only had four little ones you would win. But and I can

You know, if you want to spend time deep diving on this, show you how it plays. But you learn it very quickly and it becomes addictive because people they think it’s easier than it is and then they fail. And then they want to play it again and start again. So but it’s highly tactile, just to get you, you know, this thing you take it out the box.

Jason Hsieh (08:31)
Do you start with the smallest or the biggest

Chip Brown (08:33)
I’ll run it through real quick, right? So if this player if they’re just taking turns, let’s say it’s blue versus red, so at some point blue needs to play defense because red’s going to win here, right? Yeah. Blue should do a block, but because you can stack, that’s not a good enough block.

So they should use one of the little ones. So that’s a pretty good block. But this is a better block because you can stack this is both defense and you’re building offense.

Jason Hsieh (08:56)
Okay, okay. So there’s like a 3 dimensional element to it.

Chip Brown (08:59)
Yes.

And it’s up to four players. And so, you know, whoever has four of these little ones is going to win, but of course everybody only has three. So you’re a little bit under resourced. So it becomes a little bit more strategic than, you know, checkers, but not quite as difficult as chess. Although one of my sons just graduated from West Point, you know, most people would say like the world’s most preeminent leadership institution. So four years of learning you know, the principles of war.

Yeah. Strategies of war. And it just happened, he was in college when we were doing our play testing. So we were able to get like the top ten students to play, play

Jason Hsieh (09:33)
Really? In West Point. Nice.

Chip Brown (09:34)
The game. And so we’ve seen little kids play it and it goes well. Grandmas and then also, you know, yeah the world’s military leader. So it’s been real fun. And

Jason Hsieh (09:43)
Very cool.

Chip Brown (09:45)
We have a two times size one of those, which you may have seen you know, it’s so it’s like

20 Inches wide. And so I figured that I’d have some stores that would want that, but now we have Sam’s Club that wants to actually sell the big one to consumers. So that’s gonna be a consumer product next fall. I see. And then also some of our European partners. We have one of our playing card decks. I can take you through those in a little while, but this is the Glow Deck. And so it uses these pantone fluorescent inks. Yeah. And so we’re also making one of those stacks.

That uses these fluorescent inks so that you can kind of glow in the dark when you play it. So kind of jumping into some products there, but just to kind of get a sense of you know how it manifests. We’re not trying to make products, we’re trying to make relationships and just little things that pull people off their phones and engaging one another and things that seem really easy that you can get spun up very quick. Yeah, quickly. But then

You know, they become addictive and then you’re just addicted to spending time with other people instead of looking at your doom scroll on the phone.

Jason Hsieh (10:42)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. More of a social aspect of the game that kind of facilitates a real human connection instead of…

Chip Brown (10:51)
Exactly. Like I said, you know, we use this word “coopetition”, right? So we want people to, you know, to want to play because they want to win, but it’s also, you know, so it’s halfway between competitive and collaborative play. So we do have some game modes and some games that are one 100% collaborative where everyone’s trying to accomplish the same mission together and you need each other. But a lot of the games, like for instance on the stack game, you know, when you have two players, it’s just whoever can be more strategic and is thinking ahead a few moves.

But when you have three or four, then you’re making and breaking truces with each other. So it becomes where you’re you’re having to negotiate with each other. We have another game called Hextend, which is an all wooden game. It’s got 210 of these wooden hex pieces. There’s a you know, a big hex board here. And this game, whereas some of the games are very colorful, this is kind of monochromatic and then it has

Nice cool, you know, wooden pieces. And so with this one, you have to make a circuitous route from your corner of the hex board to the center hex. And so these are the pieces and you can either play a piece, you know, the nature of it has like a head and a tail, so you can play it this way or the other way.

Jason Hsieh (11:54)
That’s also a line on the edge. Okay.

Chip Brown (11:56)
Exactly.

And you can choose whether to play it on your own line or on an opponent’s line to turn them away. So you can see like this guy was getting too close, so they kinda pushed him away and he’s been making his way back in. And so this game with up to six players, again, it’s coopetition. So you have players making and breaking truces like as is necessary as the game proceeds, you know. So you know it’s

The stakes aren’t exactly war, but you know but it is it just causes people to need each other and to have to work together and sometimes study body language, you know, which we used to be very good at as a people, right? Yeah. Even before the pandemic, people were already their relationship skills were atrophying. Interpersonal communication was atrophying. And then we were all inside for a couple of years and

And yeah, able to work in our pajamas and stuff. And so even here as we’re doing this, it’s great. Neither of us has to get on a plane to do this. But it also makes people reticent to pick up the phone and call or to go into a room and meet with people. And they call this next generation the anxious generation because they have so little practice engaging with each other in the real world. Right. And so it’s just way easier, even when you are together. I have this little saying I say that

The tech is great because it brings us together when we’re apart, but when we’re together it takes us apart. Right. Because everyone has one in their pocket. Yeah. And so in an awkward social situation, it’s easier to to check some celebrity’s feed or somebody else. And I don’t have to you know, everybody in the room feels the same. It’s awkward for everybody. And so these silly little games just help people feel comfortable. It’s almost like training wheels for interpersonal communication and

You know, just gamifying thing, making it light and breezy.

Jason Hsieh (13:29)
Yeah, and I think it can also help to hopefully heal some of the division that we’re seeing so much in the society.

Chip Brown (13:35)
Absolutely. In fact,

There’s kind of a positive and a negative thing here. So we made during the 2020 election or 2022 election, we made a pack of the rank game. Yeah. Called the politics pack. And you had to play with people. You have, you know, ’cause you win points by guessing the other person’s order. And so, you

Jason Hsieh (13:53)
Yes,

Chip Brown (13:55)
Know, in the first half of the deck was like

Amber waves of gray, purple mountains, majesty, right? Things that are just easy, right? favorite colors on the flag, whatever those things are. But then as you get further in the deck, you have things where you’re commingling things that the right and the left favor. And then in order to get points, I have to think. So if I’m on the left, I have to guess the right, perhaps. If I’m on the right, I have to guess the left. What’s important to the person that’s not me?

So you it puts you in your brain having to think like the person that’s not like you. And think how would that person prioritize these? So then in order to do that, like even for seasons, right? I’m in Michigan, you’re in Arizona. So it doesn’t matter what I like about the seasons. If I want to win, I have to guess your order. Right. And so in politics, if the ranker is not my political persuasion, for me to get points, I have to think about what order that person would list these things in.

Which makes me get into, you know, the reason of why they would be in those orders. And so it actually makes the people switch positions and start to make an argument on behalf of the thing that they’re against. So the nature of the gameplay rewards you for thinking about the other side. And so that’s exactly what you’re talking about. Now, here’s the bad thing about that. I did a whole bunch of paid media,

Jason Hsieh (15:07)
Yeah.

Chip Brown (15:07)
Facebook rejected it.

Jason Hsieh (15:09)
Because it’s political? Is that why?

Chip Brown (15:11)
Well because it was political, but then here’s the thing. I got to know my congressman and so I got connected into a whole bunch of people inside the beltway that are both congressmen and senators and all these people that do the think tanks. Yeah. And none of them wanted it on the left or the right because it solves the problem. Right? They make money by not solving the problem.

Right. So that’s the frustrating part. But that’s the thing of be living in a free country. The people can play this game and gamify understanding each other’s position. Because sometimes our elected leaders aren’t actually being productive and constructive in terms of solving the problem. You know, it’s just easier for them to stay opposite one another. Which doesn’t last and that’s why we have elections and all that kind of stuff. But the point of it is it just causes you

To think about more than yourself. And same thing, like I’ll give you a an example. So this attractive assets this is in the risky business deck, right? Yeah. So when we’re at fraternities and sorority houses, we have a guy who has to guess if what order he’s gonna put these things in. So if he’s saying on a woman, what are the attractive assets? And what’s the order? Body, face, heart, mind.

Now he has to guess what his friend’s gonna say, right? But he realizes there’s women in the room. So is my friend gonna put what he’s supposed to put or what he really thinks? Okay. Same thing like this. So for younger kids, this one says chores. Clean, cook, laundry, make bed. It’s the same thing. Let’s say it’s a twelve year old. Is he putting what he does or what his aspirational answer is, right? So it the nature of

Laws and rules and all that stuff. Community itself polices that, right? If you’re in a constructive dialogue, things are never too far left or too far right or too far up or down or whatever. People have to come together and figure out what they have in common to do life together. Because we all exist together on one planet.

Jason Hsieh (16:55)
Sure.

Chip Brown (16:55)
Sure, sure. So anyway, so that’s you know, there’s just some philosophy behind it all. And we have even like a make my own deck, for instance. So these are literally cards that

After like if you’re a leader, whether that’s a parent or a teacher or a CEO of an organization or a not for profit, you can assemble cards together to take your group through a paradigm. And they’re just playing a game, but you’re gamifying sort of a narrative that you’re gonna take them through and make the cards at the beginning more icebreaker and then get them thinking and thinking. So as a leader you can kind of curate a pathway through these cards and then you can actually

Give the card, you can make your own cards as a leader so that it’s hyper focused locally on whatever is important to the organization. But even more so, you can put these in the hands of the end user. And so your customers or your consumers or your day laborers or you know, your team or whatever, they can gamify what’s important to the organization and create the content themselves. And then they own it. And it’s so it’s like a very fresh, creative, innovative way to get at what’s important.

To any organization or family or friend group or whatever. All that philosophy

Jason Hsieh (17:57)
I see that’s super cool.

Chip Brown (17:58)
But on the skin of it, it’s just you know, simple, easy silly party games.

Jason Hsieh (18:04)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it’s like, also need to design it in a way it doesn’t spark too much debate.

Chip Brown (18:11)
Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. And you know, I’ll even say like do you know the company IDEO in Silicon Valley? So when I was publisher at HarperCollins, one of the things I was charged with is figuring out how to combat the downward pricing with Kindle and you know the Apple books and stuff like that. So yeah. Okay.

Jason Hsieh (18:29)
Yeah, yeah.

Chip Brown (18:30)
So I had a strategy called communicators and concepts. And so communicators are authors and

Publisher needs authors, but I felt like we also should have concept driven titles so that you can not have to pay royalties on everything. That way, if there’s downward price, you don’t end up just publishing less and then it’s bad for authors too. You do both. And so I hired some people from this company, IDEO. So IDEO, this process, it uncovers what they call latent consumer demands. So

The IDO process brought us the Swiffer, you know, the Swiffer that you clean your floors with.

Jason Hsieh (19:01)
Yeah.

Chip Brown (19:01)
Everybody already had a vacuum, everybody already had a broom, everybody already had a mop. So why do they need a swiffer? How was there room for another product? It comes from observing people in home and in store. And so you can see they’re frustrated, the vacuum is too much work, you have to plug it over there, haul it over here. It’s but you have to get around the furniture. The mop is gross, wet, nastiness.

The broom just knocks up dust. So they found this thing that’s like a razor and razor blades model called the Swiffer by observing consumers in home and in store. Another product that came for that is the beach cruiser bicycle with seven gears. Right. So at the time w when this process, I think it was Trek that first made this beach cruiser bike that had seven gears. You either have a beach cruiser bike or a dirt bike or whatever, or mountain bike.

Or like a Lance Armstrong bike. And at the Lance Armstrong was big at the time, right? So everything was lycra and helmets and even at Walmart, it was like, you know, stuff that most people didn’t want to buy. That’s where the biking industry was going. But this idea process uncovers that most consumers just want to feel like they’re 13 years old again riding their bike. Right? But the bikes that were sold didn’t have gears.

That made you feel like that. But so now if you’re like 35 or something and you want to feel like you’re 13, you might not want to pedal up the hill of San Francisco with no gears. So they just put gears on a beach cruiser type bicycle and it accomplishes both. So that’s that IDEO process. So for it, so my point is give you some examples outside of the toy industry. The reason these simple colors are on this is because it’s a signifier in subtext.

To the consumer that this is kind of elementary. Right? These are the same colors from the game, sorry. Right. But when you

Jason Hsieh (20:40)
Yeah.

Chip Brown (20:42)
Look at the side, you can see it says public toilet, cover, hover, never, whatever. So that doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s just for five year olds, right? Yeah.

Jason Hsieh (20:51)
You

Chip Brown (20:51)
And so even like I said, there’s 50 adulting, 50 everyday life, 50 leisure time, and there’s zero red cards in here.

Including the one that’s on the box is not in here. That’s one of the expansion packs. And then the inside of this box, for instance, we put the mom’s choice gold award on the this one, yeah, but not on this one. This one says the number one party game by the Ritz Carlton.

Jason Hsieh (21:13)
Yeah.

Chip Brown (21:14)
So you know, on the inside of this,

So see there’s a space with a little sticker that says here’s where you put your expansion pack.

And of course there’s even a sample of really good, really bad in there too. So just in terms of product design and development and packaging, you know, having these things that makes it simple to understand, like notice there’s no lifestyle images on this. Yeah. Because then I’m into like, well, what race, what demographic,

Is this guys or girls or blacks or whites or rich or poor? People just see a simple game and they go, Okay, what is this? And it says right on the instant community, just add people, relationships explode. That’s kind of a unique promise for a simple kids game. Yeah. And then, you know, so then they flip it over and they see the price and they realize, this is not I think we can do this, right? And then it tells right on the side it tells you the different ways you can play it.

So people can imagine playing it with the family, the multi-generational family at Thanksgiving or with their fraternity and sorority friends or whatever. So that IDEO process uncovers all those little details, everything from price, but packaging and colors and signifiers. And most tendencies for humans is to overlay more information when something becomes confusing versus just dialing it all the way back. Right.

Jason Hsieh (22:24)
Right, so.

Chip Brown (22:24)
Even like for instance, these these abstract strategy games are meant to sort of look like jazz albums, right? Jazz albums are very chill on the cover, yeah. But the music, jazz music is is kind of you know fluid and everything. And so there’s the instructions on the back. So it looks a little more technical, right? But it’s simple here, but then I never even have to open the box to understand exactly how to play the game. Right?

Jason Hsieh (22:47)
How to play the game, yeah.

Chip Brown (22:49)
So it’s like

This speaks to me from 15 feet in the store and then I can get access to it here and kind of see what it’s about and then if the price is right, they make a decision.

Jason Hsieh (22:58)
Yeah, you put a lot of thought into the packaging and figure out how to best present the product as well.

Chip Brown (23:04)
Yeah, yeah. So

The third one that I showed you Hextend briefly, but you know, so there’s sort of a family of products. And then this one is actually a generic card game. So this there are jazz albums that kind of have this look. But so this is our Dura Deck playing cards, which are waterproof and tear-proof. Yeah. I’ll kind of go sideways on here. I’ll get back to that in minute, but suffice it to say

Let me take a little turn to playing cards. So we have some card games, deluxe card games that are really pretty and everything, but we had retailers that were telling us you should make playing cards because they don’t have to explain them to the consumer. They like the design, but then you there’s no rules, right? Yes. Well, there’s millions of playing cards. Why would we make another one?

Jason Hsieh (23:42)
Yeah.

Chip Brown (23:43)
Right? But as Disney innovators

You know, we took this challenge seriously and this ended up being a Toy of the Year finalist or Toy Fair in New York, biggest toy show in the Western Hemisphere. So the idea here is when you play cards, it’s the edges of the cards you use, right? So like if we do a full size cards, there’s five cards, that’s pretty big. Versus

Jason Hsieh (24:01)
Yeah.

Chip Brown (24:02)
If all I need when I’m playing, and this comes from the IDEO process, watching people play cards, the only part they use is the edge.

Yes, that’s true.

Jason Hsieh (24:10)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s how you design it. Yeah.

Chip Brown (24:14)
So that’s the whole deck right there.

Jason Hsieh (24:16)
Yeah, very easy to carry.

Chip Brown (24:18)
The left

Edge and the right edge, and the middle two-thirds is missing. So, kind of take you through that, we figured it ought to be waterproof and tear-proof. So I bought, you know, 25 different waterproof decks, everything I could find. And every one of them, the cards stuck together.

PVC material, especially if they got a little bit wet, right? So we made one with PT material with this microfiber treatment on it. So they’re very slidey.

So this is almost

Almost like a fidget toy. So this is the full size version, you know, of the Razor deck. Yeah. And so this same IDO process when we watched people playing generic card games like Spit or Peanuts, I don’t know if you know these games. So this is basically the game Peanuts, but every one of the decks is a duradeck material, right? so they’re all

You know, waterproof, terraproof. So and when you play this game, it’s basically four people playing integrated solitaire. And so if you have 13 levels of ace to king, so in four suits times four people, four times four is 16 piles that’ll go ace to king. But you imagine what the decks have to be different on the back, so after the round you can flip them over and see who scored what point. Okay. So instead of suits where they’re all disparate decks.

You know, we just have colors. ‘Cause you can recognize colors much quickly, much more quickly than shapes. And then instead of a small number and pips on the card, since you’re trying to very quickly go instead of ace the king, we go zero to ten, so it’s only 11 levels. So if I have this two, I’m looking for a beige one to play. So we all players have four color on the front and the numbers are real big with the pips being in the corner.

But the backs of the decks are all you know, each its own distinct color. Okay. So the

Jason Hsieh (25:55)
Okay

Chip Brown (25:57)
But the face is all four color. All four decks have all four of those on the face. And then there’s to keep track of the score, you know, we’ve gone old school with this wooden cribbage board.

Jason Hsieh (26:06)
Mm-hmm.

Chip Brown (26:06)
And then so little all these things about the playtesting and kind of figuring out all the little things that can happen.

So in this game, you get a point for every card you played, but a minus point if somebody goes out and you haven’t gotten rid of your decimate pile. And so if I had, let’s say, 41 points and I got, let’s say I had 44 points and I got a minus three, I would go back three spaces. But at the beginning of the game, if I got a negative and I’m going starting from zero, I just flip this over and put it on the three with the red side up.

Right. So it’s like maybe a 5% chance that might happen. But that is you know, you play test it enough to understand how to have you know, all those things and then you make the instructions really simple and then the rest of it you put in the FAQs. Yeah. I wanted to share one other thing about that game. So you know, I was talking about the colors of how easy on the rank game it’s you know, it’s just these basic colors. In this case

You know, you want to make it more elegant and this has a big sort of gradations of gray board that you play into, right? So it’s the four decks times four suits, that’s sixteen piles that go zero to ten. And then you track it on this deal. But the colors, you know, you wanna find colors that work together well that are more interesting than the ones that everybody else uses at Hasbro and

So these colors, if you take a picture of the Cinque Terre, which is that little those five towns just south of Geneva in Italy, over the sea. Okay. These are the colors that you’re allowed to paint your house in those five cities.

Jason Hsieh (27:26)
I didn’t know that. Okay.

Chip Brown (27:27)
So I just went in it to an image of all those. I mean, if you Google like Cinque Terre in Italy, you’ll see, you know, it’s all these houses up on the cliffs.

That match each other in color. And so I just borrowed those colors because, you know, they’ve been working for a 100 years in Italy in a place that everybody’s up the money to go visit. So it just makes it more interesting than just red, green.

Jason Hsieh (27:48)
I see. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You’ve definitely put a lot of thought behind the product design packaging and the way it’s being played. Yeah. You can tell it’s like looking at the product design element that you try to incorporate into the gameplay and the user experience overall. Yeah.

Chip Brown (28:04)
Yeah, exactly. Because people, you know, I think that’s it’s the same thing like if you get in a car and it’s just not right or you buy a shirt and it doesn’t fit right or something like that. You always you know, sometimes you don’t think consciously about it and people will complain when something doesn’t work. But if you

Jason Hsieh (28:18)
Yes.

Chip Brown (28:19)
Put in the time, I think that’s a sign of respect to especially if it’s a product and people are or a service and people are paying money for it.

You know, that you think through how to give them the most excellent friction free experience that they can have. And in our case, our objective is to help them engage with one of each other in the real world. You know, so everything is in service to that.

Jason Hsieh (28:36)
Of course, of course, of course. So as we’re kind of wrapping up today’s interview here, if you have to share just one piece of device with someone that’s getting started in the toys and game industry, what would that be?

Chip Brown (28:46)
I would say just do it, right? To borrow it from Nike. You’re born at a time where this has not been possible for you know generations. And now, between Kickstarter and you can just ChatGPT can show you exactly help you with the rules and you know what’s the best game mechanics to put in all that stuff. So, you know, do your research, but just start.

Just start you know, an object in motion stays in motion and if you get started and start playtesting, you’ll learn how to improve the product and before you ever go to market and you’ll succeed.

Jason Hsieh (29:17)
Hmm. Okay. Thank you for that piece of advice. And for our audience, that would love to learn a little bit more about you and your company. Where is the best place for people to find you online?

Chip Brown (29:25)
I think probably, you know, we have all kinds of domain names and we’re on different stores and stuff. But you know, rather than remember the company story as like therankgame.com. All of our products are at therankgame.com and you can, you know, read about the background of the company there and stuff like that. We have other games too, you know, this these other party games. So we succeeded quickly with the rank game and then when we were encouraged to do playing cards,

Those succeeded, two of became award winner. Three of them actually became award winners. So we appreciate people taking an interest in the company and bringing these tools, you know, games to their friends and help people get off their phones or off their screens. We’re never gonna finish our Netflix queue, right? And we all subscribe to more things than we can ever have time to do. So

Jason Hsieh (30:08)
Yeah, overconsume that’s true.

Chip Brown (30:09)
Just my encouragement would be just to get

With your friends and spend time together in the real world.

Jason Hsieh (30:15)
Of course. So, and thank you so much for sharing all that and sharing.

Chip Brown (30:17)
Yeah,

Jason. My pleasure. Appreciate you, man. Thanks for doing what you do.

Jason Hsieh (30:21)
Same here. And thank you for our audience for tuning into this episode of Toy Business Unboxed podcast. I hope today’s conversation give you some practical insight and fresh inspiration for growing your own toys or game companies. This podcast is proudly brought to you by Toy Launch, a leading marketing and growth partner for toys and game company. At Toy Launch, we help brands scale on Amazon and beyond through full service account management, advertising, SEO, creative, catalog authorization, influencer marketing, and more.

If you’re looking for a proven team that really understand both the toys and game industry and e-commerce marketing, we’re here to help. If you’d like a personal breakdown of your brand, opportunity, and your best next step, you can schedule a free consultation session with us. Just visit toy-launch.com/schedule. If you want to connect with your follow toys and game founders, join our free communities at toy-launch.com/group. We just recently launched a few free Facebook group as well.

For more resource update and industry insight, visit us anytime at our homepage. Until next time, keep innovating, keep creating, keep bringing joys through toys. This is Jason Hsieh signing off on the Toy Business Unboxed Podcast. We’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a good one.